by Ian Buruma
Some politicians, such as Frits Bolkestein, then leader of the free-market conservatives, or VVD, did raise the matter, as did a left-wing sociologist named Paul Scheffer in an explosive essay entitled “The Multicultural Drama.” Bolkestein warned of clashing values. Scheffer analyzed the dangers of isolated, alienated foreign communities undermining the social cohesion of Dutch society. Both were denounced as racists. To see massive immigration as a problem at all was, in respectable circles, worse than bad taste; it was like questioning the European ideal or racial equality. The twin evils of World War II, as everyone knew, were nationalism and racism. Any hint of a revival would have to be squashed at once. This was understandable, perhaps even laudable. But it didn’t stop many people from feeling that Europeanism and multiculturalism were the ideals of a complacent elite, of the modern-day regenten. What such people were waiting for was a politician who was crass enough to express their anxieties and break the discussion wide open. That man was Pim Fortuyn.
4.
Max Pam, the distinguished writer and Friend of Theo, did not vote for Pim Fortuyn. But like other former leftists, he is disillusioned with what he regards as the moralistic complacency of the social-democratic political class. We had dinner one night at his rambling house in the quiet and verdant streets of south Amsterdam. Not too far from where we were was one of the densest immigrant areas in the city. Mohammed Bouyeri lived there until the day he murdered Van Gogh. It was not far in geographical distance, but many miles away socially. Pam had grown up in that part of town himself, when it had just been built in the 1950s in a spurt of social-democratic idealism, a district of affordable homes for young low- and middle-income families. It is now one of Amsterdam’s largest “dish cities,” mostly inhabited by people of Turkish and Moroccan descent, wired to the Islamic world through satellite TV.
We had an argument about Fortuyn, and his extraordinary popularity among people with whom he could not have had anything in common. Fortuyn was often described as a relnicht, a “screaming queen.” Discretion was certainly not his style. But openly gay men, let alone screamers, do not, as a rule, become successful right-wing populists. People searching for political messiahs tend to look elsewhere. And yet they saw Fortuyn as an angelic savior. Pam believed that this happened despite Fortuyn’s open homosexuality. The main issue, in his view, was fear of Muslim immigrants. The Dutch, he said, were not racists. But successive Dutch governments had been far too tolerant of intolerance. They should never have allowed those dish cities to grow into hotbeds of religious bigotry. The streets in which he once played had become “like the South Bronx.”
I had been to Overtoomse Veld, and the South Bronx it was surely not. The problems of immigration clearly had much to do with Fortuyn’s popularity. But I think his baroque style, his being a relnicht, may actually have added to his special aura, the mystique of a man who came from nowhere—from heaven, perhaps—to save his fellow countrymen. In many traditional communities, in Asia, but also southern Europe, transsexuals and transvestites play important roles in sacred ceremonies. They are different, and thus discriminated against. Most make a living as prostitutes. But they also inspire a kind of mystical awe. For like angels, they are above the mundane lives of ordinary men and women.
Fortuyn himself, the man who would be pope, saw a connection between sex and religion. In April 1999 he gave a fascinating interview to Trouw, a newspaper that used to be the official organ of the Calvinist pillar and still has a strong interest in spiritual affairs. The interviewer asked Fortuyn to give his personal views on the Ten Commandments. In his response to “Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery” he talked at length about having sex with many men in the darkened backrooms of gay bars in Rotterdam. One place he frequented was called Shaft; another was Mateloos, or Boundless, a word he liked to apply to himself.
“I don’t mean to be blasphemous,” he said, “but I have to say that the atmosphere of Catholic liturgy comes back to me in the backrooms of gentlemen’s clubs. The backroom I frequent in Rotterdam is not totally dark. Filtered light leaks into the room, just like in an ancient cathedral. There is something religious about having sex in such a place. Religiosity and coming together—sometimes achieved in sex—can be two sides of the same coin…. A backroom is certainly erotically exciting. More exciting than a church? Well, you won’t hear me say that. I found it very thrilling to be an altar boy. Let’s judge things by their own merits.”2
Not exactly the sort of thing one would hear from Le Pen, or Haider. But then, Fortuyn was not always a man of the right. As a young academic in Groningen, he was a socialist, a loyal member of the Social Democrats—as, by the way, were the young Theo van Gogh, as well as his killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who wrote the film that gave rise to the murder. Nor was immigration always an issue for him. This began only after he moved to Rotterdam in the early 1990s, to become a sociology professor. Local immigrant youths smashed the windows of Boundless and threatened its clientele. Fortuyn suddenly felt vulnerable in a country where he had thought he was safe. This had a profound effect on his political thinking.
In February 2002, a reporter asked him why he felt so strongly about Islam. “I have no desire,” he replied, “to have to go through the emancipation of women and homosexuals all over again. There are many gay high school teachers who are afraid of revealing their identity because of Turkish and Moroccan boys in their classes. I find that scandalous.”
Did he feel personally threatened? “No, I’m not a timid man.” So why the hatred of Islam? “I don’t hate Islam. I find it a backward culture. I have traveled in many parts of the world. Wherever Islam rules, it’s simply ghastly. All that ambiguity. They’re a bit like those old Calvinists. Calvinists are always lying. Why? Because their moral principles are raised so high that it’s not humanly possible to live up to them. You see the same thing in Muslim culture. Now look at the Netherlands. Where could a candidate for a huge political movement such as my own be openly gay? I take pride in that. And I’d like to keep it that way.”3
There was a sexual element even in his nostalgia for the stern comforts of an older, more disciplined order. Memories of his favorite primary school teacher inspired the following reverie: “He was a big man in every respect, his height, his posture, and especially those hands! A rumor had it that he laid one of the difficult boys over his knee and spanked his ass with those big hands of his. The boy couldn’t sit down for a day. Apocryphal in this case, perhaps. But that kind of thing worked.” Fortuyn believed that the educational reformers of the 1960s, “those newfangled theoreticians in leisure wear,” brought this grim idyll to an end. A yearning for discipline would remain part of his nostalgic reveries.
Fortuyn wrote many books, about the purple governments, about the dangers of Islam, about his own life. At one time, he was a successful political columnist for a conservative journal, and a highly paid speaker, much in demand from chambers of commerce, military bases, and business groups of various kinds. But his real talent was not as a writer, let alone a thinker. His insights were mostly banal, when not simply misinformed. He was never taken seriously by the professors, whose praise and recognition he once craved. Fortuyn’s genius was theatrical. Self-presentation was his greatest talent. The transformation from a mediocre academic into a popular cult figure was his final masterpiece.
You can see the transformation take place in his photographs. People remember his narcissism at Groningen University, where his office was decorated with a huge portrait of himself. But in the early pictures, Fortuyn still looks unremarkable, a balding, bearded sociologist, a figure rather like Ad Melkert. A little better dressed than most academics, perhaps, but nothing special. It was later, in the 1990s, when he shaved off all his remaining hair (for an audience at the Vatican), that the image of Pim Fortuyn, relnicht, savior, scourge of Our Kind of People, fell into place. Part walking penis, part phony aristocrat, Fortuyn became a presence, in TV studios, on radio programs, and at public debates, that coul
d not be ignored. Even the voice—a peculiar mixture of camp and menace—was mesmerizing.
One of the highlights of Fortuyn’s short career was his performance in a television debate in 2002 with other party leaders. In terms of social background, they were more or less equals. None of the party leaders, not the later prime minister, Balkenende, a Christian Democrat, nor Ad Melkert, or even Hans Dijkstal, the conservative leader, had a background that could be called remotely upper-class. But the Dutch political elite is not an aristocracy. It is defined less by class than by attitude, of virtue, sobriety, and unquestioned authority. Our Kind of People, on the whole, are also extraordinarily dull.
And there was Fortuyn, flush from a huge electoral upset. His upstart party of dodgy amateurs had swamped the city council of Rotterdam. The party elders were outraged, especially Melkert, who could not even bring himself to look Fortuyn in the eye, let alone congratulate him. The more churlishly his rivals behaved, the more Fortuyn hit his stride, using his body like a trained actor: teasing, joking, mocking, cajoling—all in that high-pitched, teasing tone. An arched eyebrow, a slight flutter of the eyelashes, was enough to make the earnest regenten look like gauche schoolboys who failed to see the joke at their expense. One couldn’t keep one’s eyes off the man. Never before had Dutch politicians looked so foolish. Their carefully nurtured facade of quiet authority lay in tatters. It virtually ended Melkert’s career. The relnicht had won.
5.
The son of a traveling salesman (in envelopes), whom he despised, and a doting mother, who indulged his fantasies of being her “crown prince,” Fortuyn always felt like an outsider. That was a large part of his appeal to all those who felt excluded, in terms of class, wealth, prestige, or power. Even religion may have played a part. The Fortuyns were Catholics in a largely Protestant small town. At school, Fortuyn always wore a suit and tie, eccentric even in more formal times. He was not interested in sports, let alone girls.
“I want to belong,” he wrote in his autobiography, Babyboomers, “but I don’t belong … since my earliest childhood years I felt different and peculiar…. Whenever I forgot how different I was, my friends and their parents would remind me of it. …I was always special, in the way I dressed, spoke, and behaved.” He knew why, or at least he thought he did: “Being an outsider is part of my character. I’m ‘a man in his own right’ and that has to do with my homosexuality.”4
Wishing to belong, yet taking a special pride in being different, is not unusual among minorities. The desire to conform to an ideal that is out of reach can turn into a kind of mockery. Benjamin Disraeli saved the English aristocracy in a bourgeois age by flattering their self-image in a bizarre form of mimicry of their manners. Yet the aristocrats never quite trusted him, as though he were really playing some elaborate trick at their expense. Oscar Wilde, the Irish dandy, took his climb into the English upper class very seriously, yet never missed a chance to ridicule it. Such men know they will never quite belong. But they like to imagine that they do, in a form of theater that verges on satire.
Fortuyn bought a house in Rotterdam, to go with his suits, his butler, his Daimler, and his pet dogs. He named it Palazzo di Pietro. The house was bought by an admirer after Fortuyn’s murder. Everything has been lovingly preserved. One can visit the house on a “virtual tour” at www.palazzodipietro.nl. First comes the family crest, designed by “Professor Dr. W.S.P. Fortuyn” himself, an ornate coat of arms with two stylized lions, a type of Greek goddess, and a crown topped with a pair of stag horns. A click of the mouse then guides the visitor through the marble-floored hall, the drawing room, the study, and various other rooms, all done up in a self-consciously classical style with candelabra, empire furniture, red velvet drapery, nineteenth-century paintings, and various busts and pictures of Fortuyn. A set of photographs in an album embossed with the family crest shows Fortuyn relaxing in his house in Italy, Fortuyn driving the Daimler, Fortuyn with Kenneth and Carla, Fortuyn giving a speech, and Fortuyn reclining like a movie diva in his professorial cap and gown. It is pretentious but not without humor. He took such delight in his masquerade, and yet there is that hint of travesty, the arched eyebrow, the mocking smile of the eternal outsider.
Fortuyn may have meant everything he said, but he was also a political jester, a trickster. Like all tricksters, he was driven by resentment, which was perhaps the most genuine thing about him. His own sexuality played a role, as he often admitted, but his resentments found a wider resonance, for they spoke to the grievances of the déclassé. The first people to rally around him and promote him were men who had made fortunes in ways that bought them houses and yachts, but no social cachet: the former disk jockey who became an entertainment mogul, the real estate developers, advertising men, right-wing publicists, and organizers of “events.” A whiff of criminality hung over some of these men. All knew that no matter how much money they made, they would never be Our Kind of People.
Feeling socially excluded, the newly rich felt their lack of political influence. Fortuyn was their ticket to real power, or so they hoped. Raw self-interest was no doubt a part of their agenda: lower taxes, less bureaucracy, more freedom to make deals. But this was not all. Some, at least, appear to have been inspired by bigger visions, of government by businesslike strongmen who would clean up the mess of parliamentary politics once and for all. A fresh wind would invigorate a society that had been weakened for too long by wishy-washy do-gooders.
A hint of what these shadowy men are like came to me from an unusual figure in the Dutch political landscape, a genuinely conservative intellectual who had founded a think tank named after the great Irish conservative, Edmund Burke. Bart-Jan Spruyt, an intense, tweedy man in his forties, good-looking in a Nordic way, with blond hair cropped short over a bony face, wrote a book entitled In Praise of Conservatism.5 His heroes include Alexis de Tocqueville and C. S. Lewis. He is a devout member of the Calvinist Church.
After the murder of Pim Fortuyn, some of his former backers approached Spruyt as a man who could be useful. They treated him to meals in expensive restaurants, feeling him out on this and that, seeing whether they might do business. In the end, they decided that a think tank was not what they were looking for. But not before they had taken Spruyt out to one more fancy restaurant. At the end of the meal, when cigars were lit and liqueurs ordered, one of the businessmen pulled out his checkbook and wrote out a check for 150,000 euros. Slipping it across the table to Spruyt, the man said: “And now get rid of those fucking Moroccans.”*
I was puzzled by this story. Why the Moroccans? Lower taxes, less social welfare, these I could understand, but why would a rich businessman, who was unlikely ever to see the inside of a dish city, be so concerned about Moroccan immigrants?
So I asked Frits Bolkestein. Since he had been the first mainstream politician to voice his concern over immigration, I thought he might have the answer. He looked at me intently and said: “One must never underestimate the degree of hatred that Dutch people feel for Moroccan and Turkish immigrants. My political success is based on the fact that I was prepared to listen to such people.” It was a remarkable statement, but I was still puzzled, for it didn’t really answer my question. Why would a rich man feel such hatred for people who might never cross his path? This mystery goes to the heart of Fortuyn’s success. He struck a nerve that went beyond personal interests.
6.
Funerals of public figures often provoke mass hysteria. It is on such occasions that you see what lurks in the hearts of millions. The outpouring of grief, though perhaps genuinely felt, can look phony. To some extent it is. The emotions are misplaced, for they are almost never based on personal acquaintance. But the dead person serves as a focus of real anxieties and disappointments. During his short career, Fortuyn knew how to manipulate popular sentiment. If his killer was fanatically principled, Fortuyn was a master of emotional kitsch.
Again, class has little to do with it. Fortuyn’s funeral has been compared to that of Princess Diana, a real aris
tocrat who behaved like an excluded outsider, which, in a way, she was too. Some people claimed that her demise shook them up more than the death of an intimate friend, or even a husband or parent, an astonishing confession. Diana also had a natural bent for kitsch. She brought pop culture to the British monarchy and turned the institution into a soap opera. Spectacle always was part of politics, of course, monarchist or not. What Fortuyn had in common with Princess Diana was not just his embrace of showbiz as a political tool—Silvio Berlusconi, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ronald Reagan had done that as well—but his instinct for pop sentimentality.
Fortuyn has been compared to the popular Dutch singer André Hazes, a man with the looks and build of a longdistance truck driver and the dress sense of a 1970s lounge singer in Las Vegas: white suits, open shirts, chunky gold chains. This lachrymose wailer of songs with such titles as “Lonely Christmas,” or “She Believes in Me,” or “The Kite”—about a small boy who ties a letter to his kite, destined for his mother in heaven—abused his tattooed body so badly with drink that he died at the age of fifty-three, two years after Fortuyn was killed.