by Ian Buruma
Pim Fortuyn, whose rise in Dutch politics had been as sudden as it was steep, was no De Witt. On the contrary, though he was neither a Calvinist nor an ardent monarchist, his agitation was largely directed at what he described, sarcastically, as “Our Kind of People,” the contemporary regenten, members of a powerful “left-wing Church,” who looked after their own interests while ignoring the concerns of the common people. Fortuyn’s program could be summed up in negatives; he was against bureaucracy, leftist regenten, and immigration, especially Muslim immigration. He was also proudly, even flamboyantly, homosexual.
Theo van Gogh fell under the shaven-headed dandy’s spell, and often gave Fortuyn informal advice, phoning “the divine baldy” when he was excited about something, which was most of the time. When Fortuyn appeared as a guest on Van Gogh’s chat show, Theo jokingly suggested that they run for office on the same ticket. One of his ideas was for Fortuyn to campaign in the company of a Muslim woman dressed in a burqa. Fortuyn declined, but some of his best lines were in fact written by Van Gogh. In their outrageousness they understood one another, were kindred spirits, even. And they would be inextricably linked in death.
It is hard to say which had the greater impact on society, but the two murders are connected in ways that are not always obvious. To almost universal relief, Fortuyn was not killed by a Muslim jihadi of foreign descent, but by an earnest Dutch animal rights activist on a bicycle, named Volkert van der Graaf. (The fact that both killers arrived on bikes added a peculiarly Dutch flavor to their murders.) It happened a few minutes after 6:00 P.M., at the Media Park of Hilversum, where Fortuyn had just concluded a long radio interview. Tired from campaigning, but in a buoyant mood, Fortuyn, carrying a bottle of champagne, was just about to slide into his dark blue Daimler, where Kenneth and Carla, his two cocker spaniels, were patiently waiting, when Van der Graaf, a small man in a baseball cap, shot him five times in the head and neck with a semiautomatic pistol. Van der Graaf had never been to the Media Park before. He had downloaded maps, as well as Fortuyn’s schedule, from the Internet.
Exactly what prompted Van der Graaf’s action was never clear. Van Gogh’s film is not really concerned with Van der Graaf’s motives. All we know is that Van der Graaf was a sworn enemy of factory farming, and mink farmers in particular, whom he pursued through the law courts with considerable success. Fortuyn liked to sport fur collars on his winter coats, and did once write that “we must stop all this whining about nature and the environment.” As far as he was concerned, fur farms should be allowed to continue. But Van der Graaf appears to have been bothered by other aspects of Fortuyn, to do more with personality than any specific environmental policies. His hatred was moral more than political.
He thought Fortuyn was like Hitler, but not because he was a mass murderer. In some ways, Van der Graaf’s idea of Hitler sounded more like the seventeenth-century mob’s image of the De Witt brothers. What he objected to was Fortuyn’s “opportunism,” his “unwillingness to sacrifice his own interests,” his “arrogance” toward the weak and vulnerable. Above all, he objected to his “vanity,” his ostentatiousness, his “pride.” Just the look of him was objectionable: the flashy suits, the loud Windsor-knotted ties, the silk handkerchiefs spilling rather too copiously from the pin-striped breast pocket. Fortuyn was a showboat. And that, in a nation where “if you behave normally, you are already behaving madly enough,” is a grave accusation. Van der Graaf took this puritanical Dutch homily to a murderous extreme. He may have been a pathetic figure, but he was, in his way, a man of principle, to the point of being a fanatic. It is a characteristic of Calvinism to hold moral principles too rigidly, and this might be considered a vice as well as a virtue of the Dutch. It played a part in the makeup of Van der Graaf, as well as Mohammed Bouyeri, and even Theo van Gogh. The two killings, of Van Gogh and Fortuyn, were principled murders.
Volkert van der Graaf was always a difficult child. He was born in 1969, in the same small-town Protestant environment as Prime Minister Balkenende. His mother was a strict evangelical Christian, born in England, his father a biology teacher. Nature, animals, were always the center of Volkert’s world. When he was fifteen, he found work in a shelter for injured birds, but was soon dismissed for being impossible, arguing about everything, removing mousetraps to save the mice that harmed the birds, and so on. He hated the fact that his parents ate meat, refused to sit on his parents’ leather sofa, and never dined at home. While failing to complete his studies in “environmental hygiene” at the university of agriculture in Wageningen, he became a fervent antivivisectionist and a dogged enemy of intensive farming. Apart from the occasional flash of temper, Volkert was known as a taciturn, inconspicuous fellow, a bore more than a potential murderer. In 2001 he fell in love with an older woman. They had a baby daughter, and though a proud father, he appeared to be under pressure. Perhaps he was depressed. In any case, Volkert felt he had to do something big to protect the weak and vulnerable.
2.
Fortuyn’s funeral was an extraordinary spectacle, something fit for a beloved queen or a pope. He would have adored it. As a boy, Fortuyn had fantasies of being the pope. His brother and sister were made to kneel before him as worshipful priests. These daydreams lasted well into his puberty. “Where other Catholic boys might have wanted to become bishops,” he told a reporter, “only the highest was good enough for me. It shows my extravagance, I suppose.” Pages of his autobiography are devoted to a description of Pope Pius XII’s funeral. He was also impressed by the ceremony around the death of Maria Callas. All very un-Dutch.
The funeral cortège slowly made its way through the crowds in Rotterdam, tens of thousands cheering and throwing flowers in its way. The long white funeral car was followed by Fortuyn’s own Daimler, driven by his butler, Herman, who listened impassively as the Slave Chorus from Nabucco was blasted through the car speakers. On the front seat, next to the butler, sat Kenneth and Carla, the pet spaniels. Along with the coffin, the dogs were led into the Laurentius and Elizabeth Cathedral for the funeral mass. Crowds gazed adoringly on the scene, rolling their eyes and screaming “Pimmy, thank you, Pimmy, thank you!” Some began to sing the English soccer anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” They also sang the supporters’ anthems to the local soccer team, Feyenoord.
Soccer anthems might seem out of place at the funeral of a politician who never showed the slightest interest in sports. Nabucco was much more his thing. But on reflection, they are not so strange after all. The stadium has largely replaced the church as a place for community singing and other expressions of collective devotion. And the emotions stirred up by Fortuyn—tribal nostalgia, distrust of outsiders, hero worship—were precisely those of soccer fans.
When the coffin arrived, the crowds went wild, keening and whistling and hollering as though the home team had scored a goal. Every guest inside the cathedral was presented with a white rose. Ad Melkert, the Social Democrat leader, a studious, balding figure in glasses, was spotted by one of Fortuyn’s followers, a well-dressed middle-aged lady, who hissed: “Now you’ve got what you wanted, you bastard!” It was an extraordinary moment: a typical earnest politician of the center-left, who had always assumed he was on the side of “the people,” had become a hate figure, who might, in different times and different circumstances, have been lynched by the mob. An usher handed the woman a white rose. Kenneth and Carla began to bark.
“God has a mission for you,” said a postcard signed by forty men in Zeeland, the native province of Volkert van der Graaf and Jan Peter Balkenende. Another admirer saw Fortuyn as “a white-winged angel.” A young woman, visiting a small museum in Rotterdam containing Fortuyn memorabilia, believed that “such a man is born only once in a thousand years.” Letters arrived after the funeral with images of the Virgin Mary, the Italian holy man Padre Pio, and Pim Fortuyn. Clemens van Herwaarden, a researcher in Amsterdam, wrote his thesis on Fortuyn as the Messiah. He said: “People who feel unrepresented by any political party, who are relatively ig
norant, and who get most of their information from television, such people saw Fortuyn as more than a political leader; he was a savior.”1
In November 2004, a few weeks after Van Gogh’s murder, a television poll was held to determine the greatest figure in Dutch history—inspired by a similar BBC poll on the greatest Englishman (Winston Churchill). Pim Fortuyn came out on top, above William the Silent, Rembrandt, and Erasmus. Spinoza didn’t even make the list. Anne Frank might well have, but since she did not carry a Dutch passport when she was murdered, she could not be included. (A question was raised in parliament as to the possibility of granting her Dutch citizenship posthumously. The idea was rejected, however, since it was deemed to be unfair to other victims of the Holocaust.) In any event, a statue of Pim Fortuyn was erected by the city of Rotterdam in the middle of the business district. His bald bronze head shines brightly over a black granite plinth, the mouth wide open, as though he is about to give a speech. The words Loquendi libertatem custodiamus (Let us protect the freedom of speech) are engraved in the stone. Every day people come to lay fresh flowers at his feet.
Savior, angel, the greatest Dutchman in history—all this for a politician whose career began only in 1999, when he was chosen as a candidate for a new party started by a louche assortment of real estate developers, advertising men, and an ex–disk jockey. When he died, Fortuyn hadn’t even made it into the national parliament, let alone the cabinet. A Roman Catholic fantasizer, a gay man who talked openly of sexual adventures in bathhouses and “backrooms,” a show-off with the gaudy style of a showbiz impresario. How was it possible for such a man to become so popular in a country known for its Calvinist restraint, its bourgeois disdain for excesses, its phlegmatic preference for consensus and compromise?
3.
Fortuyn hated being compared to notorious figures of the European far right such as France’s Jean-Marie Le Pen or Austria’s Jörg Haider. He didn’t even regard himself as particularly right-wing. When the BBC reporter John Simpson suggested that Fortuyn’s desire to close the Dutch borders to foreign immigrants might be construed as racist, Fortuyn lost his cool, insulting Simpson in broken English and terminating the interview. He was thin-skinned in that way.
It is true that Fortuyn was no Haider or Le Pen; he was something more interesting: a populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan boys; a reactionary who denounced Islam for being a danger to Dutch liberties; a social climber who saw himself as an outsider battling the elite. Still, if Fortuyn was not simply a far-right demagogue, like Haider or Le Pen, he did tap into some of the same anxieties that swept across many parts of Europe and beyond. To a confused people, afraid of being swamped by immigrants and worried that pan-European or global institutions were rapidly taking over their lives, Fortuyn promised a way back to simpler times, when, to paraphrase the late Queen Wilhelmina, we were still ourselves, when everyone was white, and upstanding Dutchmen were in control of the nation’s destiny. He was a peddler of nostalgia.
My grandmother once remarked that life would be so much simpler if Holland were to have just three political parties: Protestant, Catholic, and Socialist. She said this in the 1930s, when many Protestants refused to patronize Catholic stores and vice versa, and marriages outside of the faith were almost unheard of. She said it when many Europeans were calling for strong men to stop the rot, and Johan Huizinga wrote his famous essay to discourage such sentiments. My grandmother had no fascist sympathies. But she was too simplistic. After all, the Protestant church had many denominations, and they all wanted their own representation. Laissez-faire liberals, too, had their own distinctly non-socialist party.
Religious and political affiliations were not just a question of parties. Every aspect of social life, what we now call civil society—sports clubs, schools, broadcasting stations, trade unions—was organized along these lines. They were called “pillars.” From the cabinet minister down to the lowest manual worker, everyone was part of one of the pillars that held up the edifice of Dutch society, and all the real or potential conflicts between the pillars were negotiated by the gentlemen who stood at their pinnacles. This is how centuries of religious strife ended in an admirable spirit of compromise, as soggy as the Dutch landscape reclaimed from a sometimes turbulent sea.
Times changed, of course, and old rivalries dissolved to make room for new ones. As church attendance dropped, drastically after the 1960s, the remaining Catholics and Protestants found a common home in one Christian Democratic Party. When the socialism in social democracy faded with the fall of Communism in the 1980s, this too paved the way for new alliances, based more on convenience than political ideas.
Since ideology and class conflict were no longer a basis for party politics, something else had to take their place. In the 1990s the “red” Social Democrats mixed with the “blue” free-market conservatives to come up with “purple” coalitions. Politicians proudly hailed the new politics as the “polder model,” a system based on the same spirit of negotiation and watery compromise that informed the politics of the pillars. Up to a point, it worked. The Netherlands was prosperous and exuded an outward calm. People were, it appeared, satisfait.
The polder model suited the Dutch. The great and the good who had once ruled the pillars, and now the welfare state, were in many respects just like the regenten of the seventeenth century. You see their countenances perfectly portrayed in the Golden Age paintings of Frans Hals: seated around their oak tables in solid, barely decorated rooms, dressed in sober black, administering poorhouses and orphanages, dispensing charity to the needy, discussing the affairs of business and state, these well-meaning, prosperous, but never, ever ostentatious notables, these excellent gentlemen of substance, have a look of probity, thrift, hard work, tolerance, and—this is the genius of Frans Hals—the ineffable smugness of superior virtue. Here was Dutch republicanism at the height of its glory: a virtuous elite of Our Kind of People discreetly wielding power, supposedly for the common good, and brooking no interference.
I have seen these faces, time and again, in the VIP boxes of sports stadiums, at parliamentary debates, at concerts and royal festivities, that same look of quiet self-satisfaction, not because of any great wealth or personal achievement, but by sheer dint of virtuously and reasonably running the affairs of a small nation where all people of consequence know one another well. (Which is not to say they like each other, of course.) These were the typical faces of “purple” too. Ladies and gentlemen in sober suits who regarded it as their God-given duty to take care of the unfortunate, the sick, the asylum seekers from abroad, and the guest workers. That is what the welfare state was for. That is how the polder model was run, from the discreetly appointed offices of the modern-day regenten.
By the 1990s, cracks had begun to appear in the purple veneer. For one thing, as in all European countries, the authority of national governments was slowly being eroded by European institutions and multinational corporations. Mounting problems, to do with pensions, health care, crime, taxes, appeared to be slipping from the grasp of nationally elected politicians. Years of officially promoted European idealism and denigration of national sentiment added to a growing sense of unease. What was it, in a world of multinational business and pan-European bureaucracy, to be Dutch, or French, or German? People were beginning to feel unrepresented. They no longer knew who was really in charge. This is when the modern regenten, like Ad Melkert, the Social Democrat, began to lose their grip on popular sentiment. Worse than irrelevant, they began to be targets of active hostility.
The politics of consensus contains its own forms of corruption: politics gets stuck in the rut of a self-perpetuating elite, shuffling jobs back and forth between members of the club. This happened in Austria, where Social and Christian Democrats had been in power for too long. It happened in India, where Congress had ruled for decades. It happened in the purple Netherlands too. Without ideology, and with nothing but jobs for the boys at stake, party politics was losing its
raison d’être, and trust in the old democratic order could no longer be taken for granted.
Muslim immigration was only the most visible focus of popular unease. People in The Hague or Rotterdam were used to seeing shabby areas of relative deprivation around the main railway stations. Now these areas were looking increasingly foreign, more like Edirne or Fez. For a long time, it was not “done” to see anything problematic in these changes. Multiculturalism was the orthodoxy of the purple governments. To question this orthodoxy, or to worry about the social consequences of such swift changes in the urban landscape, was to risk being called a racist. When Fortuyn made disparaging remarks about Islam, leaders from the mainstream parties talked about “Nazism.”
Once again the shadow of World War II fell over the politics of the present. Comparisons were made between “Islamophobia” and anti-Semitism. Anne Frank’s name was invoked in parliament as a warning. Never again, said the wellmeaning defenders of the multicultural ideal, must Holland betray a religious minority. Those hundred thousand Jews still haunted the collective memory as a shameful reminder. In political circles, it was sometimes Jewish survivors, such as Ed van Thijn, the former mayor of Amsterdam, who made this point most forcefully. They did so with good intentions, but instead of encouraging debate, such moral reminders tended to result in pained silence. Except in the case of Theo van Gogh. His response was to go for the ultimate shock effect, by indulging in the crassest, most revolting taunts against Jews. However, both Van Gogh and some of his critics were missing the point. For Jews were never the issue.
Criminality in certain immigrant areas was becoming a serious problem. Too many people were living in the larger cities illegally. Cases of theft, drug dealing, even serious street violence went unprosecuted, and usually unreported. There was a feeling in major cities that the police had lost control of the streets and criminals could do as they liked. When a number of Social Democrats tried to raise the matter inside their party, the PVDA, they were told to switch the subject. It was not even permissible for newspaper reporters to mention the ethnic background of criminals, for this would have revealed patterns that were better left unspoken. A former PVDA leader, Felix Rottenberg, believes that “feelings of guilt of the postwar generation had a huge influence on politically correct thinking.” Guilt, that is, for what their parents had allowed to happen while looking the other way. People were still looking away, but from a different problem.