Murder in Amsterdam (5 page)

It is true that Fortuyn was no Haider or Le Pen; he was something more interesting: a populist who played on the fear of Muslims while boasting of having sex with Moroccan
boys; a reactionary who denounced Islam for being a danger to Dutch liberties; a social climber who saw himself as an outsider battling the elite. Still, if Fortuyn was not simply a far-right demagogue, like Haider or Le Pen, he did tap into some of the same anxieties that swept across many parts of Europe and beyond. To a confused people, afraid of being swamped by immigrants and worried that pan-European or global institutions were rapidly taking over their lives, Fortuyn promised a way back to simpler times, when, to paraphrase the late Queen Wilhelmina, we were still ourselves, when everyone was white, and upstanding Dutchmen were in control of the nation's destiny. He was a peddler of nostalgia.

My grandmother once remarked that life would be so much simpler if Holland were to have just three political parties: Protestant, Catholic, and Socialist. She said this in the 1930s, when many Protestants refused to patronize Catholic stores and vice versa, and marriages outside of the faith were almost unheard of. She said it when many Europeans were calling for strong men to stop the rot, and Johan Huizinga wrote his famous essay to discourage such sentiments. My grandmother had no fascist sympathies. But she was too simplistic. After all, the Protestant church had many denominations, and they all wanted their own representation. Laissez-faire liberals, too, had their own distinctly non-socialist party.

Religious and political affiliations were not just a question of parties. Every aspect of social life, what we now call civil society—sports clubs, schools, broadcasting stations, trade unions—was organized along these lines. They were called “pillars.” From the cabinet minister down to the lowest manual worker, everyone was part of one of the pillars that held up the edifice of Dutch society, and all the real or potential conflicts between the pillars were negotiated by the gentlemen who stood at their pinnacles. This is how centuries of religious strife ended in an admirable spirit of compromise, as soggy as the Dutch landscape reclaimed from a sometimes turbulent sea.

Times changed, of course, and old rivalries dissolved to make room for new ones. As church attendance dropped, drastically after the 1960s, the remaining Catholics and Protestants found a common home in one Christian Democratic Party. When the socialism in social democracy faded with the fall of Communism in the 1980s, this too paved the way for new alliances, based more on convenience than political ideas.

Since ideology and class conflict were no longer a basis for party politics, something else had to take their place. In the 1990s the “red” Social Democrats mixed with the “blue” free-market conservatives to come up with “purple” coalitions. Politicians proudly hailed the new politics as the “polder model,” a system based on the same spirit of negotiation
and watery compromise that informed the politics of the pillars. Up to a point, it worked. The Netherlands was prosperous and exuded an outward calm. People were, it appeared,
satisfait.

The polder model suited the Dutch. The great and the good who had once ruled the pillars, and now the welfare state, were in many respects just like the
regenten
of the seventeenth century. You see their countenances perfectly portrayed in the Golden Age paintings of Frans Hals: seated around their oak tables in solid, barely decorated rooms, dressed in sober black, administering poorhouses and orphanages, dispensing charity to the needy, discussing the affairs of business and state, these well-meaning, prosperous, but never,
ever
ostentatious notables, these excellent gentlemen of substance, have a look of probity, thrift, hard work, tolerance, and—this is the genius of Frans Hals—the ineffable smugness of superior virtue. Here was Dutch republicanism at the height of its glory: a virtuous elite of Our Kind of People discreetly wielding power, supposedly for the common good, and brooking no interference.

I have seen these faces, time and again, in the VIP boxes of sports stadiums, at parliamentary debates, at concerts and royal festivities, that same look of quiet self-satisfaction, not because of any great wealth or personal achievement, but by sheer dint of virtuously and reasonably running the affairs of a small nation where all people of consequence know one another
well. (Which is not to say they like each other, of course.) These were the typical faces of “purple” too. Ladies and gentlemen in sober suits who regarded it as their God-given duty to take care of the unfortunate, the sick, the asylum seekers from abroad, and the guest workers. That is what the welfare state was for. That is how the polder model was run, from the discreetly appointed offices of the modern-day
regenten.

By the 1990s, cracks had begun to appear in the purple veneer. For one thing, as in all European countries, the authority of national governments was slowly being eroded by European institutions and multinational corporations. Mounting problems, to do with pensions, health care, crime, taxes, appeared to be slipping from the grasp of nationally elected politicians. Years of officially promoted European idealism and denigration of national sentiment added to a growing sense of unease. What was it, in a world of multinational business and pan-European bureaucracy, to be Dutch, or French, or German? People were beginning to feel unrepresented. They no longer knew who was really in charge. This is when the modern
regenten,
like Ad Melkert, the Social Democrat, began to lose their grip on popular sentiment. Worse than irrelevant, they began to be targets of active hostility.

The politics of consensus contains its own forms of corruption: politics gets stuck in the rut of a self-perpetuating
elite, shuffling jobs back and forth between members of the club. This happened in Austria, where Social and Christian Democrats had been in power for too long. It happened in India, where Congress had ruled for decades. It happened in the purple Netherlands too. Without ideology, and with nothing but jobs for the boys at stake, party politics was losing its raison d'être, and trust in the old democratic order could no longer be taken for granted.

Muslim immigration was only the most visible focus of popular unease. People in The Hague or Rotterdam were used to seeing shabby areas of relative deprivation around the main railway stations. Now these areas were looking increasingly foreign, more like Edirne or Fez. For a long time, it was not “done” to see anything problematic in these changes. Multiculturalism was the orthodoxy of the purple governments. To question this orthodoxy, or to worry about the social consequences of such swift changes in the urban landscape, was to risk being called a racist. When Fortuyn made disparaging remarks about Islam, leaders from the mainstream parties talked about “Nazism.”

Once again the shadow of World War II fell over the politics of the present. Comparisons were made between “Islamophobia” and anti-Semitism. Anne Frank's name was invoked in parliament as a warning. Never again, said the wellmeaning defenders of the multicultural ideal, must Holland betray a religious minority. Those hundred thousand Jews
still haunted the collective memory as a shameful reminder. In political circles, it was sometimes Jewish survivors, such as Ed van Thijn, the former mayor of Amsterdam, who made this point most forcefully. They did so with good intentions, but instead of encouraging debate, such moral reminders tended to result in pained silence. Except in the case of Theo van Gogh. His response was to go for the ultimate shock effect, by indulging in the crassest, most revolting taunts against Jews. However, both Van Gogh and some of his critics were missing the point. For Jews were never the issue.

Criminality in certain immigrant areas was becoming a serious problem. Too many people were living in the larger cities illegally. Cases of theft, drug dealing, even serious street violence went unprosecuted, and usually unreported. There was a feeling in major cities that the police had lost control of the streets and criminals could do as they liked. When a number of Social Democrats tried to raise the matter inside their party, the PVDA, they were told to switch the subject. It was not even permissible for newspaper reporters to mention the ethnic background of criminals, for this would have revealed patterns that were better left unspoken. A former PVDA leader, Felix Rottenberg, believes that “feelings of guilt of the postwar generation had a huge influence on politically correct thinking.” Guilt, that is, for what their parents had allowed to happen while looking the other way. People were still looking away, but from a different problem.

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.

M
ax 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.