Word: rotterdamers
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...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 his university studies but later joined the Labor Party. With a doctorate in sociology, he became a professor at Erasmus in 1990. Though he was popular with his students, a university committee judged...
...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...
...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 requiring new immigrants to take mandatory Dutch lessons. As asylum seekers choose other destinations, their annual rate of entry to the Netherlands has dropped from...
...left-right coalition. Prime Minister Kok, who is not running for re-election, was taunted by bystanders at Fortuyn's funeral on Friday and chose to leave the cathedral by a back door. "The politicians are always compromising, never solving anything," says Peter Ver A, 42, who owns a Rotterdam "coffee shop" where customers can smoke hashish and marijuana. "The usual politicians just didn't see the problem of crime. People want everybody to follow the rules." Dutch rules, that...