Word: fortuyn
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...Fortuyn had laid out some of that political smorgasbord last Monday afternoon at a Hilversum radio studio, where he also predicted he would live to the ripe age of 86. As he left the studio, a gunman approached him in the parking lot and fired five shots, hitting the candidate in the head, chest and neck. He died soon after...
...Fortuyn's alleged assassin appears to be a political animal of a very different sort. Volkert van der Graaf, 32, who was arrested immediately after the shooting and arraigned on Wednesday, is an animal-rights activist and long-term member of an environmental group that legally challenges farmers who seek to expand their operations. A principled vegan who once told an interviewer he couldn't abide the cruelty of baiting a fishhook, Van der Graaf lived in the small town of Harderwijk with his wife and three-month-old baby. "He was not given to jokes or eccentricities," says Caroline...
...Graaf, who is expected to face a murder charge, has not cooperated with prosecutors, leaving his motive unclear. While farm policy was not a central issue for Fortuyn, he is reported to have once said he would lift a current ban on mink farming. Prosecutors on Friday said they had located the names of three other Fortuyn List candidates and maps of their neighborhoods in Van der Graaf's car, and were investigating a videotape that showed the suspect conferring with two others in a city where Fortuyn was speaking earlier on the day of his murder. They are also...
...country where the Prime Minister, Wim Kok, famously likes to ride a bike to work, Fortuyn's flamboyance was a political statement in itself. He traveled in a Daimler with a fender flag bearing the family crest, employed a butler named Herman, wore tailored Italian suits and oversized ties, and reveled in his homosexuality. "He was like a jester, the one who holds up a mirror to the politicians and says, 'Look, you're ugly,'" notes Arthur Ringeling, a political scientist at Rotterdam's Erasmus University. Raised in a middle-class Catholic family, Fortuyn was a nominal Marxist during...
...Fortuyn jumped to electoral politics only last summer, when he started consultations with a new grassroots party called Livable Netherlands, and he was voted to the top spot on its electoral list last November. But the party threw him out in February after he told an interviewer he considered Islam a "backward culture" and advocated the repeal of the first article of the Dutch constitution, which forbids discrimination on religious or racial grounds. He quickly formed his own party, which ran away with 35% of the March 6 vote for the Rotterdam city council...