Word: fortuyn
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Something blacker than mere mourning descended over the Netherlands last week. The murder of populist politician Pim Fortuyn drove thousands of dazed citizens into the streets in shock, anger and a cataclysmic sense of loss that went beyond one life to encompass the nation itself. A man who just weeks earlier was hotly disputing comparisons with French nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen seemed in death to have bizarrely taken on the luster of his avowed idol, John F. Kennedy. His new window on a harder-edged Dutch future, disturbing to some and promising to others, slammed shut before it ever...
...courage to speak out, and he was killed for his honesty," said Andrea van Es, who had placed her own bouquet on the pile in front of Fortuyn's house on a quiet square in Rotterdam. Many of the people shuffling through the streets of Rotterdam in a silent march last Tuesday, filing past his open casket in the city's cathedral on Thursday's Ascension holiday and lining the route of his cortege on Friday were moved not by his politics, but by the brutal violence that silenced him. "There was only a thin line between Pim Fortuyn...
...Fortuyn's meteoric rise in just nine months on an anti-immigration platform had dealt a telling blow to the pragmatic consensus seeking that has long defined Dutch politics. His murder appears to have destroyed it altogether, leaving the country without its moorings as it approaches the most emotional and uncertain election in its history this week. Polls before his death predicted that Fortuyn would attract about 17% of the vote, enough to make him a major player in forming a new government. He is widely expected to do much better than that as the martyred head of his electoral...
...Fortuyn, 54, was a man for confrontation, not consensus. He wanted to re-establish Dutch border controls and let in refugees only from Britain, Denmark, France and Germany. He sought to dial back the generous disability scheme that supports the roughly 15% of Dutch workers who claim they can't work for medical reasons. At least a quarter of the state bureaucracy should be laid off, Fortuyn maintained, while at the same time the number of regional governments should be doubled and schools made smaller. A Fortuyn government would not only reintroduce the draft, but also mandate a special four...
NETHERLANDS United in Death In life Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn divided his countrymen with controversial views on immigration. But after a gunman shot dead the flamboyant sociologist, who founded his eponymous party three months ago, thousands of Dutch, including many opponents, came together to demonstrate their horror at his death. More than 15,000 people lined the streets and 800 packed Rotterdam Cathedral for his funeral. Police arrested animal-rights campaigner Volkert van der Graaf on suspicion of the murder...