The assassinated politician Pim Fortuyn's power base was among the alienated whose real fears were ignored by the politically correct Dutch elite, writes Michael O'Loughlin
Imagine Dublin as a slightly different city: out of the million inhabitants, a quarter of a million are Romanian, and another quarter of a million are Nigerian. Of this half a million "non-Irish" Irish, most have been born and raised here. Mainly in Ballyfermot, Finglas, the north inner city.
They are, strangely, thin on the ground in Ballsbridge and Killiney. The political and intellectual elite which resides in such areas preaches multiculturalism and tolerance, but sends their children to private schools, where, by coincidence, all the children are "white" Irish.
Meanwhile, on the mean streets of Clondalkin, and in the school benches, the Romanians and Nigerians make up 70 to 80 per cent of the population. Standards suffer, as many of these children don't speak English, or even Irish, slowing down the classes.
Then, an Irish Times columnist arises, an amalgam of Kevin Myers and Fintan O'Toole. From the school of John Healy, he likes to provoke the Dublin 4 elite by stating plain truths. Instead of the poor small farmer of Mayo, his touchstone is the decent hard-working ordinary white man. He articulates the deepest fears and prejudices of these people. One day, he decides to abandon journalism and turns to politics. And he is welcomed like the new Messiah.
This is to some extent the background of Pim Fortuyn, the assassinated Dutch politician. While comparisons with Jean Marie Le Pen and Jörg Haider are easy to make (and infuriated Fortuyn), each country in Europe is a separate case and it helps to see them in their own context. The Dutch are now in a state of shock about the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. Within an hour of his death people were talking about the "loss of innocence", and the "11 September feeling". While this is, no doubt, subjectively true, the whole Pim Fortuyn phenomenon can hardly be seen solely in terms of the shock, horror and embarrassment of the Dutch political establishment.
As is the case with France and other countries, part of the problem is the fossilisation of that political establishment. In Holland, over recent decades the parties came up with a consensual solution, a so-called "purple coalition" that combined the traditional social democratic party, liberal party and "liberal conservatives".
The problem with this was that while it effectively kept the right-wing Christian Democrats out of office, the compromises and fudges necessary to keep such disparate coalition parties together led to a no-profile politics, where many subjects couldn't even be mentioned for fear of opening rifts. And all the parties, out of a mixture of misplaced "political correctness" and sheer arrogance, failed to see what was happening on the streets of the major cities, where immigration had become the number one issue, but one with which politicians were terrified to get involved.
Fortuyn vehemently denied he was racist, and pointed out that many of his entourage were "coloured". Something subtler was at work. The idea arose in some circles in Holland that these people weren't inferior because of race: they just happened to come from an inferior, Islamic culture. It wasn't their fault. Given hot running water, birth control, education and the rest, they would eventually behave just like we Dutch.
These ideas have become common even among left-leaning segments of Dutch society, and they laid the foundations for Fortuyn's ideological appeal. But ultimately his electoral appeal came from the situation on the streets, which the government tried to ignore.
There can be no doubt that there is a crisis in Holland, which indeed bears some resemblance to the crisis in other European countries. The "immigrants" form the majority of the prison population, and are disproportionately responsible for street crime. They originate from the typical working-class neighbourhoods, which weren't exactly little Gardens of Eden, but which did benefit from a couple of generations of socialist governments, serious town planning and the welfare state.
Gradually these bulwarks of proletarian bliss became eroded by the presence of immigrant families, which bred at a higher rate than the natives. It's the old story: the corner shop replaced by the halal butcher.
People, with some justification, began to feel threatened, as they became a minority on their own streets, suddenly surrounded by hordes of children who don't even speak their language properly. The reality, of course, is far more complex, but the feelings are real.
Fortuyn's electoral appeal lay in these people. White, working class, middle-aged males. People who felt aggrieved, ignored and unheard. Surrounded by criminal gangs of kids. No one can deny the element of truth in this.
Just a couple of days ago, I was sitting on a train from the city centre of Amsterdam to the airport. The train was packed with commuters. A small group of Moroccan teenagers were noisily flirting and horsing around, smoking in a non-smoking carriage, as teenagers all over the world at all times tend to do. Then, at one stage, they launched into their favourite new chant: "Hamas, Hamas, All the Jews to the gas!".
On the one hand, typically provocative teenage behaviour. On the other, in a country with Holland's sensitive past with regard to the Jews, it is interpreted as threatening, and guaranteed to inflame Dutch passions. People's faces were a study in fear and loathing. You could almost count the votes ready to be delivered to Fortuyn.
AND yet, the indignation of the Dutch political establishment at Fortuyn's success has a hollow ring to it. Seven years ago, when I still lived in Amsterdam, I took my daughter to a Christmas Day matinée of the Dutch National Ballet, a magnificent and memorable production of Swan Lake.
As we stood in the queue, an old man, obviously Turkish, approached me and asked, in broken Dutch, if this was the place where he could get a birth certificate. But, by a bizarre conjunction of bureaucratic and architectural ambitions, the Amsterdam City Hall and Nat- ional Opera are housed in the same complex.
I told the man that he was in the right building, but as it was Christmas Day, the offices were closed. He looked at me blankly, nodded, and walked off. I dined out off this story for years. The reaction was always the same. Turkish friends nodded in quiet recognition, and Dutch friends spluttered in condescending disbelief.
But you didn't need to be a prophet to see which way the wind was blowing. On the night of September 11th, gangs of youths held spontaneous street parties in some parts of Holland. Shocked Dutch TV crews descended upon the Arab markets of Amsterdam East, looking for comment. To their amazement, they were cold-shouldered. Not only that, they found it hard to find anybody of the older generation who read Dutch newspapers, watched Dutch TV, or even spoke Dutch.
They realised with a jolt, that the satellite dishes crammed onto the balconies of the social housing projects were tuned not to Dutch TV, or even to CNN, but to Al Jazeera. Like the rejection of the Nice Treaty, it came as a shock to the Dutch equivalent of Dublin 4, who had kept their heads firmly planted in the sand for the last 20 years. But it came as no surprise to Pim Fortuyn - nor to the people who voted for him. They after all, had been living among those people for years.
This was the core of Pim Fortuyn's appeal. A feeling of alienation and threat. Our country being taken away from us. But once enunciated, what to do with it?
One of the planks of his policies was to end immigration, close down the borders. On the face of it, simple enough, reasonable even. After all, Holland is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. It sounds good, but it's totally ineffective. A few thousand asylum seekers are not going to change the situation in Holland one way or another. And besides,a unilateral closing of the borders is just not an option, in an integrated European approach.
Fortuyn's crucial issue was what he called integration. Looked at on paper, it's hard to see the problem. Out of a population of 16 million only two million are "immigrants", and of those about one million are Islamic.
Holland is unlikely to be Islamicised just yet. But, in cities like Amsterdam, Islam will soon be in the majority, if it is not already. And that is the perceived threat. Fortuyn argued that you couldn't tolerate intolerance. The minority groups, particularly of an Islamic nature, must be integrated; all those children must be turned into little model Dutch citizens.
These pernicious and populist ideas were quietly supported by many liberal sectors of society. Hardly surprising, the reaction of the Islamic community was one of fury, terror and anxiety. Children came to look on him as an Adolf Hitler-like figure. And when his vote grew so large, people's reaction was immediately one of hurt and bewilderment.
This hatred and intolerance of another culture is the direct antithesis of what we mean by the multicultural society, and was the dark heart of Fortuyn's media-friendly sugar coating.
However, by the time of his death, he was already running out of steam. Gradually serious critique of the economic basis of Fortuyn's policies began to erode his credibility. Withdrawal from Europe is not an option, nor is de-Islamication of a million people. Schools will eventually have to be integrated, at the risk of offending the Dutch elite.
Michael O'Loughlin is a novelist, poet and screenwriter