There will be many in the Muslim world who on hearing the news of the assassination of the leader of the Dutch extreme right-wing movement will have felt some grim satisfaction. Pim Fortuyn was, after all, not merely a bigot who wanted to close the country’s doors to immigrants, he was an unashamed Islamophobe. This is the man who called Islam "backward", who believed that existing immigrants in the Netherlands (most of them Muslims) had to be integrated — by which he meant that they should be forced to abandon their Islamic beliefs and practices.
But the assassin has done the most terrible disservice to the cause of Dutch freedom and liberalism. In the Netherlands, the way of politics is by the ballot, not the bullet. Assassination has never been the Dutch way, at least not since that of the country’s founding father, William the Silent, and that was over 400 years ago. It will have chilling consequences in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. It shatters the image of the Dutch as a tolerant, peaceful people, who were prepared to live and let live.
Worse, just when the far right had been so resoundingly defeated in France, it gives the Dutch extreme right a martyr — and only a week before their general election. The image of Dutch tolerance was always a bit of a myth: Dutch football teams are, for example, among the most violent in the world. In any event, politics had already become uglier with the rise of Fortuyn’s movement which last month won 34 percent of the vote in Rotterdam’s municipal elections and was set to gain possibly 20 percent of the vote nationally next week. But it was an image the Dutch had of themselves and now it has been brutally ripped away from them. They have been rudely awakened to discover that their treasured liberal, consensus politics have vanished and in their place stands something all too frighteningly similar to what goes on in some less attractive Third World countries.
The consequences will be nasty. It will change the face of Dutch politics, not merely in next week’s vote but for the foreseeable future. It will make the Dutch more suspicious, more inward looking, less tolerant, more willing to hear the bigoted message that Fortuyn peddled. Indeed, the manner of his death has already transformed him in public eyes. That is apparent in the way that people on the street, angry and shocked., are now saying he was no bigot, that he was not like France’s Le Pen or Austria’s far right leaders Joerg Haider, that all that he wanted to do was make the Netherlands a safer and better society. They deceive themselves. But they clearly believe it — and that belief will be a thousand times more difficult to confront and argue against when the person at the center of it has been killed.
One can only say thank goodness that it was not an immigrant or a Muslim who killed him; that would have made the backlash infinitely worse. But only a fool believes there will be no backlash. There will be, and the danger is that immigrants and Muslims will suffer in the process. Of course as we know, the far right was already on the rise in the Netherlands, but that could have been contained and lanced by exposure to debate, as was done in France. The assassin has prevented that happening. He has opened a Pandora’s box that will not be closed. He has stripped away Dutch innocence and the result will be a cruder, more vicious brand of politics. It is not just that he has ensured that a thousand new Fortuyns spring up, hydra-like, in the wake of the dead leader, or that he has created a martyr who will be venerated by the far right across Europe — both of them appalling prospects. But by killing Fortuyn he has turned the entire Dutch political system on its head. Fortuyn will be seen as the victim, and those who opposed him as the bigots. That is an extremely frightening development.
