Word: fortuyn
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Dates: during 2002-2002
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...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...
...easy task to tease out how much of Fortuyn's appeal stemmed from his larger-than-life personality and how much from his right-wing program. "He made the other politicians look like robots," concedes Tip Ho Ong, who works for the Rotterdam Antidiscrimination Action Council. Fortuyn seemed to make his own rules: an earlier Dutch extreme-right politician, Hans Janmaat, known for his "Full is full" slogan, was fined in 1994 for using anti-immigration language. Fortuyn said the same thing with impunity...
That in itself is an indication, perhaps, of how the Netherlands has changed. The multicultural approach has given way to the idea of integrating minorities, but it hasn't happened fast enough to counter the lure of a figure like Fortuyn. First- and second-generation foreign-born amount to about 17% of the Dutch population, roughly the same as in other West European countries and the U.S., says Erasmus migration expert Han Entzinger. In Rotterdam itself, the figure rises to 45%, and in some neighborhoods - and many schools - it is much higher. To promote integration, the Netherlands in 1998 began...
There's no question that unease was a major factor in Fortuyn's rise. "My grandmother was in the Dutch resistance during the war, and she compares Fortuyn with Hitler," says Michel van Dyke, 24. "I say you can't compare the Dutch with the Germans. Fortuyn just said what a lot of people thought: that foreigners are causing a lot of problems in the Netherlands...