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.