Charlemagne | The Netherlands' most notorious killer

Did the time fit the crime?

By M.S. | AMSTERDAM

TWELVE years ago Tuesday, Volkert van der Graaf, a Dutch environmental activist, walked up to the anti-Muslim populist politician Pim Fortuyn in the parking lot of the Netherlands’ state broadcasting studios and shot him in the head. Last week, after serving two thirds of an 18-year sentence, Mr van der Graaf was released from prison. Several political parties tried to prolong his detention, arguing he might re-offend or be targeted by vigilantes; Mr Fortuyn has become something of a secular saint to his supporters, and his assassin is widely despised. Mr van der Graaf’s return to society—in an undisclosed town, monitored by a GPS-tracked ankle bracelet—has so far been quietly anticlimactic. But it has reminded the country of a time when politics in the Netherlands, long renowned for its culture of tolerance and compromise, seemed to be sliding uncontrollably off the rails.

It was the rise of Mr Fortuyn in 2001 that first knocked Dutch politics off balance. A flamboyantly gay ex-professor of social sciences fond of his three-piece suits, his Daimler, and his King Charles spaniels, Mr Fortuyn was a natural provocateur. His books and articles attacked the entire grey edifice of Dutch politics, with its “polder” model of negotiations between business and labour, its tight-knit governing circles, and its consensus policies that make no one entirely happy. After eight years under a centrist Third Way coalition between the Labour party and the laissez-faire Liberals (locally known as a “purple” cabinet), a reservoir of resentment had built up all across the political spectrum. When Mr Fortuyn entered politics, initially at the head of the law-and-order Liveable Netherlands party, he tapped that resentment and found himself shooting up in the polls.

While Mr Fortuyn said he considered himself neither right- nor left-wing, it was mainly the conservative elements of his programme that caught on, particularly his linkage of crime and immigration and his open attacks on Islam and multiculturalism. Where most politicians anxiously skirted the issue of high crime rates among young Moroccan Dutch, Mr Fortuyn dished out ethnic stereotypes with a comedian’s glee. In one interview in the leftish Volkskrant, he called Islam a “backward culture”. His blunt language was cheered by Dutch who felt constrained by political correctness; they felt he was daring to name problems that had been swept under the rug. For his opponents, and for Dutch Muslims themselves, Mr Fortuyn was simply legitimating bigotry.

Mr van der Graaf’s motives encapsulated the frustrations of far-left activists in the early 2000s, watching a right-wing turn suck the oppositional wind out of their sails. The radical environmentalist studied at the Netherlands’ famous Wageningen agricultural development university; psychiatrists said he had a tendency to perfectionism. As with so many technical young men who commit political murders, he saw his actions achieve the opposite of their intended result. In the wake of the assassination, Mr Fortuyn’s party won 18% of the vote in the 2002 elections and took a major role in the subsequent cabinet.

Over the next few years, Dutch politics swung ever further out of kilter. Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the reality-TV director Theo van Gogh denounced Islam in terms fiercer than Mr Fortuyn’s, before Mr van Gogh was stabbed to death by an Islamist radical. Dutch voters rejected the European Union’s proposed constitution in a referendum. A new populist, Geert Wilders, adopted Mr Fortuyn’s provocative style and pushed it farther to the right, with a platform calling for banning the Koran and, later, seceding from the EU.

Had he not been murdered, Mr Fortuyn’s political career might well have imploded on its own. The irrepressible contrarian feuded with every institution he ever belonged to; he had been forced to frantically set up a new party in 2002, the List Pim Fortuyn, after splitting with Liveable Netherlands just before the election. Within months, the LPF was collapsing in incompetence and dissension, and by 2008 it had disappeared. But Mr Fortuyn’s political legacy remains enormous. Today, even politicians from the Labour party speak about Moroccan-Dutch crime rates in terms he would have agreed with.

The struggle over Mr van der Graaf’s release hinted that while the whirlwind era of Dutch politics that Mr Fortuyn launched may be over, the tensions that led to it have not gone away. Three Dutch parties —Mr Wilders’ Party for Freedom, the Christian Democrats, and the small Christian-right SGP— demanded that Mr van der Graaf’s parole be delayed. In many countries, 18 years (let alone 12) would be considered an absurdly short sentence for an assassination. But Dutch rules mandate that prisoners be released for good behaviour after two thirds of their terms. Fred Teeven, the Netherlands’ deputy justice minister, argued that he had no legitimate reason to buck the rules, and a broad majority in Parliament agreed.

Meanwhile, a “purple” Labour-Liberal government, much like those Mr Fortuyn denounced, is back in power. Mr van der Graaf is receiving police protection, despite polls showing that 65% of Dutch think he should not. The gap between popular resentment and the “polder model” consensus in The Hague is still wide. It is Mr Fortuyn’s heirs, above all Mr Wilders, who have learned to exploit it.

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