Wouter Engler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Like many others, I was shocked—but perhaps not surprised—to hear about the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. Many people who follow politics suspected that this would perhaps happen one day—as if it was written in the stars. How did we get to this point? As a Dutchman, I already lived this experience. At the turn of the last century, we had a similar case in Holland where a man, Pim Fortuyn, coming from the fringes of the establishment, caused uproar in daily politics and even threatened to sink the establishment itself.
Who was Pim Fortuyn? In most of the English-speaking media, there are only snippets about this case, most of them delivered by the opponents of Fortuyn, housed throughout Dutch politics and media. Fortuyn was a golden wizard-apprentice of the Dutch state: a convinced Marxist and a member of the Dutch Communist and later Labor party in his early years. His academic career was very successful, Fortuyn eventually rising to the level of professor at the University of Groningen, specialising in “Marxist Sociology”.
Fortuyn managed a notable public-facing project for the Dutch state: a travel product for students, which I used myself for six years, to my great satisfaction. To date, it is the only publicly known Dutch government project delivered on time and within budget.
Until 1993, Fortuyn operated within the dogmas of Dutch politics but then became a pundit for Elsevier magazine, where his contributions culminated in the 2002 book De puinhopen van acht jaar Paars (The Wreckage of Eight Years of Purple). He critiqued the Dutch governments of the 1990s, praising the economic progress of that era, but then attacking most of the social policies of the time.
Fortuyn’s political rise began In February 1997, when he published the book Against the Islamization of our Culture—in which he argued that modern Western liberal values are contrary to Islamic beliefs and that immigration from the Middle East to Europe should be stopped. Today, that might cause a tempest in a teacup and some mild pearl-clutching but back then, it was reason enough for well-known Dutch commentator of the day Marcel van Dam to call him an “exceptionally inferior person”. Thus began the process of his demonization.
The next five years were quick, noisy, and violent, ending in the death of Fortuyn by shooting.
In the finest traditions of the European Left—think Stalin turning on Bukharin: “Koba, why do you need me to die?”—the Dutch state and the Labor party immediately did a 180 turn on Pim Fortuyn. It is here that the paths of Pim Fortuyn and Donald Trump become strikingly similar. Trump was a mainstay of the media and entertainment industries when he previously indulged in liberal behaviour, and was never short of women and selfies with Democrats. But when Trump became politically active for the Republicans, he magically became a racist/fascist ogre.
Fortuyn was a flamboyant gay professor who in personal charm and intellect towered far above the silly mediocrity that dominated the political scene in the Netherlands, before and after. Yet, when he suddenly broke with the grey mediocre pre-thought-out party slogans, the Labor party scrambled to compare him with Adolf Eichmann, the infamous Nazi bureaucrat of murder (to prevent litigation, the actual wording was of course much more sly than that).
The choice of going into politics after being a pundit was set in stone on November 25th, 2001, when Fortuyn was elected party leader by an overwhelming majority in the members’ meeting of Leefbaar Nederland. This was a short-lived victory, because on February 11th, 2002, the steering board of Leefbaar Nederland asked him to resign following some statements Fortuyn made in De Volkskrant on February 9th, 2002.
Fortuyn used a quote attributed to Voltaire— “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—before stating that he believed the constitution’s first article against discrimination should be abolished and that Islam is a backward culture incompatible with Western values. This clearly struck a raw nerve with an establishment that complimented itself on putting the article in the constitution. Legal experts have since determined that the article is indeed unworkable.
With supporters of Leefbaar Nederland, Pim Fortuyn almost immediately proposed his own party: the Lijst Pim Fortuyn, better known to history as the LPF. After the municipal elections in Rotterdam on March 6th, 2002 were won with more than 30%of the votes, Fortuyn was convinced that he would have a chance in the national elections for the House of Representatives on May 15th, 2002.
Barbs shot back and forth between the media and Fortuyn. The Netherlands’ press portrayed Fortuyn as the “Dutch Haider” (a reference to the then infamous Austrian politician), while Fortuyn told a Dutch female journalist that she would do a better job “cooking something”.
Things took a turn for the worse. Shortly after a radio interview for 3FM at the Mediapark in Hilversum, on May 6th, 2002, Pim Fortuyn was shot dead in a parking lot by Volkert van der Graaf, an Antifa and animal rights activist. All this happened just nine days before the elections for the House of Representatives.
During the elections on May 15th, 2002, the LPF received 1.3 million votes, good for 26 seats in the Dutch House of Representatives. Had Fortuyn lived, some private polls suggested that he might have gotten a clear majority of the seats in the House of Representatives—something unique in the Netherlands, where clear majorities don’t happen and government policy is typically based on some murky compromise.
During the verbal struggle with the Dutch media and Labor party, a caricature of Pim Fortuyn appeared, portraying him as a racist fanning the flames of the seedy underbelly of Dutch society, grossly and deliberately ignoring all the other things Fortuyn said and wrote about—things that provoked a spontaneous recognition of truth in the eyes of many Dutchmen. Some people started to embrace the media caricature of Fortuyn and Dutch politics returned to grey mediocrity again—i.e., the back-and-forth of predictable party slogans.
It was a small Dutch version of what is happening on a grander scale with Donald Trump: a political establishment going completely off its collective rocker by the uproar one man, arriving at the right time and place in history, can provoke.
Donald Trump also has an impressive list of enemies who don’t really care what is said or not, and he will do well to give speeches behind a plexiglass screen until next November.
Just to be sure.