In de Ban van Fortuyn
Jutta Chorus and Menno de Galan
462 pages, including index and notes
published in 1990

The murder of Pim Fortuyn on May 6th, 2002 was the first political murder in the Netherlands to have happened since the seventeenth century. As such, it was the end of an era, a catalyst for change whose consequences are still being worked out today. Dutch politics lost its innocence that day. Fortuyn's murdered thought he saved the Netherlands from a very dangerous man, but in reality he only succeeded into making Fortuyn into a martyr, a handy symbol for lesser people to sell their politics with. Though the movement he founded has now almost disappeared from politics, Fortuyn's legacy lives on.

Fittingly, In de Ban van Fortuyn (which means something like "Captivated by Fortuyn") opens with the day of his murder and the immediate aftermath of it, before it trackbacks to Fortuyn's youth and early career, then to slowly move forward through his stormy career, his murder and what happened to his party afterward. The authors are two well respected Dutch journalists who were already following Fortuyn, almost from the start of his political career. The result is a well told history of Fortuyn, sympathetic to Fortuyn himself, if not necessarily his politics, but without losing their objectivity.

I'm not myself a huge fan of Pim Fortuyn to put it mildly. He was a rightwing populist with Islamophobic tendencies, at a time when passions against Muslims were already running high. The night of his murder I was never so relieved as when it turned out his murderer was a white environmental activist; even so things quickly got ugly with riots in front of the parliament building in Den Haag. A lot of people were very, very angry and his party swept the elections on the tide of public ressentment against the "old politics" and its failure to protect Fortuyn. Had the murderer been a Muslim, who knows what might have happened...

But who was Fortuyn? He was born into a petit-bourgois, Roman Catholicfamily from the sticks, who even as a child always wanted to be the centre of attention. He studied sociology, law, history and economics in Amsterdam; after his studies he became an university teacher in marxist sociology at the university in Groningen in the early eighties, where he moved from the radical left towards the social democratic PvdA. In 1986 he moved on into a position as researcher for the Sociaal-Economische Raad, one of the top advisory boards in the Netherlands. After three years he left this job for a stint as the director of the OV-studentenkaart BV, the public company set up to provide students with cheap travel cards. This was followed by a short stint at the university of Rotterdam, before he became a fulltime speaker and columnist for Elsevier, a rightwing political magazine, where he remained until his death. During this time he became slowly known as a political pundit, writing increasingly succesful books on various subjects, while steadily moving towards the right.

Yet Fortuyn remained something of a failure, having left most of the positions described above under clouds and becoming known as somebody who did not play well with others. He made a comfortable living as an after dinner speaker and columnist, but he hadn't achieved anything big yet. Enter a party tailormade for him: Leefbaar Nederland (Liveable Netherlands).

Leefbaar Nederland (LN) had been created as the result of the succes of local parties in the late nineties. While national politics had been dominated for decades by more or less the same big four parties (PvdA, CDA, VVD and D66) in council elections more and more councils had seen the rise of local parties, focused on local issues and demands. One of the most succesful was Leefbaar Hilversum, which spawned a sister party, Leefbaar Utrecht and then in 1999 a national party. In the leadup to the local elections of 2002, a veritable flood of Leefbaar parties was founded or renamed in councils all over the Netherlands; together these parties were the big winners of these elections, all of which raised high expectations for their national counterpart.

That party in the meantime had cautiously sought out Pim Fortuyn as a potential leader, after he had made clear his intentions to go into politics and especially after it became clear how much of a vote winner he could be. The climate was ripe for a charismatic new party and leader, as people had become dissatisfied with the dull, grey politics that dominated most of the nineties, as well as the arrogance of the big parties, which seemed to take their votes for granted while not paying attention to their views.

As In de Ban van Fortuyn describes it though, this marriage of party and leader was not an easy one. Both Fortuyn himself as the LN leaders were wary about working together, neither quite sure of the other. Yet in November 2001 they finally came together and immediately seemed destined for succes, as the party soared ahead in the polls. This was not to last long however, as in February 2002 Fortuyn was ejected from the party, after he expressed the desire to remove article one of the constitution, which enshrines the principle of equality under law into law and which forbids discrimination on any grounds. Fortuyn argued this article should be removed if it proved an obstacle in the fight against the Islamic threat, if it meant he could not call the Islam a backward religion, as he believed it to be. (One reason he believed this was because of is supposed attitude towards homosexuality, as Fortuyn himself was openly gay.)

Fortuyn responded by founding his own party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn, which after his murder became the second largest party in parliament, as well as one of the parties in the new government.Though Fortuyn himself did not live to see it, this result seemed a definative victory for his ideas.

That is, until it turned out his party was full of meatheads, idiots, cheaters and thickies. During its short period in power, from May 2002 until October of that year, the LPF provided a neverending political soap opera, as ministers fought with each other, leaders came and went and crisis after crisis swept the party, until its coalition partners had enough and pulled the plug. Though the pary still won eight seats in the following elections, it failed to keep any seats in the 2006 elections and since then has been abolished itself. In de Ban van Fortuyn does well in showing the powerstruggles and backbiting within the party that caused this failure.

in the end then, what remained of Fortuyn's heritage? The party he founded is dead, its successors stillborn, while his call for a new sort of politics, one that listens more to "the voices of the people" and is less insular, has largely failed, only surviving as p.r. exercises by the old parties. The only part of his politics that has survived is his Islamophobia, which has been taken over wholesale by characters like Geert Wilders, a far more nasty character then Fortuyn ever was.

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