The strength of feeling at the murder of Pim Fortuyn suggests something larger than shock at his killing has been felt by the people of the Netherlands. Denis Staunton in Rotterdam reports on the creation of a new icon
As Pim Fortuyn's funeral cortege moved through Rotterdam yesterday the thousands who lined the route threw flowers, applauded or simply wept. At the dead politician's home, the sea of flowers, teddy bears and hand-written tributes continued to swell. And as in Britain after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, five years ago, normal life in the Netherlands came to a standstill.
Holland has seldom seen anything like the outpouring of emotion that has followed Fortuyn's assassination on Monday. And with a general election taking place on Wednesday, Dutch politicians and commentators are asking if their country will ever be the same again.
At yesterday's Requiem Mass in Rotterdam Cathedral, Fortuyn's brother called on mourners not to turn the anti-immigration politician into a saint. The call may have come too late - for many of those who lined Rotterdam's streets yesterday, Fortuyn's death has already transformed him into Holland's lost leader.
"Pim Fortuyn was my Messiah. He will live forever," yelled one distraught man outside the cathedral.
Many messages at Fortuyn's makeshift shrine compared the murdered politician to John F. Kennedy, the US president assassinated in 1963, or Martin Luther King, the black US civil rights leader shot dead in 1968. One read: They crucified Jesus; they shot Pim.
Some of this week's hysteria can be explained by the fact that Fortuyn's assassination was Holland's first political murder for four centuries. But the sheer strength of feeling suggests that something else is at play and that many of his compatriots feel that Fortuyn's death has robbed them of a political voice.
"The biggest influence of the Fortuyn phenomenon lay in the fact that he brought into the spotlight of publicity many things that were not spoken of before. What counted as politically incorrect until recently was suddenly being discussed," according to Peter Groot, a professor of linguistics at Amsterdam University.
Fortuyn shot to prominence two months ago when his right-wing party took 35 per cent of the votes in Rotterdam's city election. His group, called List Pim Fortuyn, was expected to win up to 20 per cent of the seats at next week's national parliamentary election.
An openly gay former professor of sociology, Fortuyn was an unlikely standard-bearer for the far-right. His flamboyant lifestyle, complete with butler and chauffeur-driven Daimler, was in sharp contrast to the downbeat style of conventional Dutch politicians.
Most unusual of all was Fortuyn's political platform, a mixture of market liberalism, protectionism, social tolerance and ethnic prejudice. He gained notoriety with his description of Islam as a "backward culture" and his demand for a total halt to immigration. But while foreign commentators dismissed Fortuyn as a fascist, he was viewed by many in Holland as a loveable eccentric who liked plain speaking.
Harry Mulisch, one of Holland's most distinguished novelists, believes that Fortuyn's personality was the key to his political appeal.
"He drew his strength from the fact that there was nothing nasty about him. The trademark of a fascist is nastiness. But he was somehow like an innocent, 12-year-old boy. I think that's how he saw himself. And that was his strength.
"He could say terrible things about asylum-seekers, and people liked him all the same," he said.
Fortuyn believed that Muslim immigrants represented a threat to Holland's liberal culture because of Islam's attitude to such issues as gay rights and the status of women. As a practising Catholic, he seems not to have noticed that his own church takes a less than indulgent view of homosexuality. And he saw no contradiction in defending Dutch pluralism by stigmatising a substantial section of the population.
In criticising immigrants, Fortuyn was pushing at an open door where many of Holland's 16 million citizens are concerned. Muslims account for 800,000 of the country's 2 million immigrants and they are often blamed for much of the recent rise in crime.
Among Fortuyn's other policies was a call for more prisons, a return to military service, tougher rules on sick benefit and the abolition of the European Parliament. He wanted Holland to withdraw from the EU's Schengen Agreement on open borders and from the United Nations treaty governing the reception of refugees.
Prof Harry Daemen, who worked with Fortuyn in the sociology department of Rotterdam's Erasmus University, recalls that, no matter what he spoke about, Fortuyn always struck a popular chord.
"Pim Fortuyn spoke about complicated questions such as the health system or school bureaucracy but even then people understood him. He succeeded, even with these issues, in mobilising their vague resentment against the ruling system," he said.
There is no doubt about the discontent many Dutch citizens feel about their mainstream politicians and the dull consensus that has governed the country for decades. Voters see little difference between the big parties clustered around the centre, and many feel their ruling class has lost touch with popular concerns.
Daemen acknowledges that Fortuyn articulated popular discontent but he urges caution in assessing the level of popular support for the right-winger's policies. "He was someone who gave expression to people's feelings about their political system. Support for Pim Fortuyn was an expression of dissatisfaction. But that doesn't mean that the people wanted a new rule in this style," he said.
After Fortuyn's death, the country's politicians decided to press ahead with next Wednesday's election but to suspend political campaigning. Fortuyn's name will still appear at the top of his party's list of candidates, most of whom are unknown and utterly inexperienced.
Some analysts believe the party could poll even better than expected, possibly emerging as Holland's biggest party. But Daemen believes that, without Fortuyn, any success for the party next week will be short-lived.
"The List Pim Fortuyn may have another success on May 15th, thanks to Pim Fortuyn's martyrdom. But the party that enters parliament will prove to be a very ineffective group and will probably disappear in the long term," he said.