Pim Fortuyn: The far right Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn, was assassinated on May 6th aged 54, just after Jean Marie Le Pen's stunning success in the first round of the French presidential elections. Outspoken, flamboyant, confrontational and highly articulate, he was in a furious mood.
Journalists, he said, kept ringing him up asking him if he was happy. There was nothing the effete, former sociology professor hated more than being cast in the same mould as the burly, former French paratrooper. He said he had not advocated sending immigrants home. He was a civilised man, he said, and Holland was a civilised country, and everyone who was in the country could stay. Indeed, the Dutch had a duty to such people.
But what he did say was "Close the borders", and those words have been enough to send shock waves through a country that has prided itself on the stability of its political system.
There was the Labour party, the Liberal party, between them the Christian Democrats, and, further on the left, the D66 party, with, around them, a cluster of smaller parties. Since 1994, a "purple" coalition of leftist Labour and the rightwing Liberals, under Wim Kok's leadership, had ruled Holland - until its resignation last month, in the wake of the report into Dutch culpability for the Srebrenica massacre.
Until recently, the assumption was that, when Kok went, either a Labour or Liberal leader would head a new coalition. But in the country's local elections, Pim Fortuyn, openly gay and proud of it, then proceeded to take Dutch politics by storm. With the general election next week, on May 15th, there were fears that his party could edge the Liberals out of second place.
It was only last November that he became leader of the small, supposedly radical Leefbaar (liveable) Nederland party. He guided the party towards the right, slamming bureaucracy in public services, challenging long-established Dutch political norms. But his relationship with Leefbaar Nederland was to be shortlived; in February, he was ejected for suggesting that the Dutch constitution's article one, banning discrimination, should be changed.
Two days later, he set up his own party, List Fortuyn, which contested the March local elections, capturing 17 of Rotterdam city council's 45 seats. He got 35 per cent of the vote.
His open gayness was fundamental to understanding his politics. His belief was that Muslim immigration undermined the society he cherished. For him, Muslims were people who hated gays, and thought women were second-class citizens. "I have gay friends who have been beaten up by young Moroccans in Rotterdam. We need to integrate these people; they need to accept that, in Holland, gender equality and tolerance of different lifestyle is very, very important to us."
He was born in Velsen, north Holland, one of many children of a conservative, middle-class, Roman Catholic family. After secondary school, in 1967 he went to the Free University in Amsterdam to study sociology. He continued his studies with postgraduate work at Groningen University, and where he lectured in Marxist sociology.
Research jobs with the government followed, in the education ministry and on the Dutch railways. In 1990, he had a one-day-a-week professorial post teaching social sciences at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. There, it was said, he lived up to what had become known locally as "Fortuyn's Law"; wherever he worked, he left in controversy and acrimony - on this occasion, in 1995.
In 1997, he published his first major book, Against The Islamicisation Of Our Culture. But he still kept portraits of Marx and Lenin hanging in his basement kitchen.
Following a recent death threat he said. "I asked the prime minister for protection, but he won't pay. If I die, it is on his head."
Wilhelmus Simon Petrus "Pim" Fortuyn: born 1948; died, May 2002