Early life and education Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn was born on 19 February 1948 in
Driehuis within the Dutch municipality of
Velsen, as the third child to a middle class Catholic family. His father was a sales representative for a envelopes and paper company and was involved in local Catholic associations while his mother was a housewife. Fortuyn was raised primarily by his mother as his father was often away for his work. He first attended a Catholic primary school, where Fortuyn later described his time as "terrible," before graduating from the Mendelcollege secondary school in
Haarlem where he was described as an academically gifted pupil. As a youth, Fortuyn initially wanted to train as a priest, but in 1967 he began to study sociology at the
University of Amsterdam and also attended lectures in history, economics and law. He then transferred after a few months to the
Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam where he continued his degree in sociology and took joint honours classes in public administration. In 1971 he ended his study with the
Academic degree Doctorandus. In 1981 he received a doctorate in sociology at the
University of Groningen as a Doctor of Philosophy.
Career Professional career at a presentation of
Thirty-Five Years of SER recommendations (1982) Fortuyn worked as a lecturer at the
Nyenrode Business Universiteit and as an associate professor at the
University of Groningen, where he taught
Marxist sociology. He was also an employee of the Groningen University Newspaper for which he wrote columns. He was a Marxist at the time and sympathized with the
Communist Party of the Netherlands (CPN), although he never became a full member. Later, he joined the
Labour Party. In 1989 Fortuyn became director of a
government organisation administering student transport cards and worked as a research assistant and advisor to the
Social and Economic Council (SER). In 1990 he moved to
Rotterdam. From 1991 to 1995, he was an extraordinary professor at the
Erasmus University Rotterdam, appointed to the Albeda-chair in "employment conditions in public service" and ran an education consultancy business. When his teaching contract in Rotterdam ended, Fortuyn made a career of public speaking, writing books and press columns, and worked as a weekly columnist for
Elsevier. He gradually involved himself in politics through regularly appearing on televised debate shows and became a familiar public figure for his charismatic and flamboyant speaking style. In 1994 he began hosting his own radio program on
RTV Rijnmond and often appeared on the political debate show
Buitenhof and later as a commentator on the business current affairs program
Business Class on
RTL Nederland. Fortuyn was openly gay, and said in a 2002 interview that he was Catholic.
Political career Fortuyn began his political career on the left and was initially a Marxist due to an aversion to the Dutch political establishment which he described as dominated by
pillarization and a "
regent mentality." He was sympathetic to the Dutch Communist Party but chose not to become a member due to personal disagreements with the party leadership and self-identified as a Marxist without becoming active in any communist organisations. In the 1970s he joined the
Labour Party and became a
social democrat. In 1986, his views shifted towards
neoliberalism in the hope that the
free market would lead to further individual emancipation, ending a perceived oppression by state
bureaucracy. In 1991, he proposed firing half of all civil servants and promoted
privatisation and
decentralisation. In 1992, Fortuyn wrote
Aan het volk van Nederland ("To the people of the Netherlands"), in which he declared himself to be the spiritual successor of the charismatic but controversial 18th-century Dutch
patriot politician
Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol. The book urges the already culturally emancipated citizen to use the free market to also liberate himself economically, from the
welfare state. In 1989, Fortuyn left the Labour Party and during the 1990s became a member of the centre-right
VVD and was briefly a political consultant to the
Christian Democratic Appeal in the early 2000s. Though on economic matters Fortuyn would largely remain a neoliberal, culturally he soon became strongly influenced by the
neoconservative political philosopher and chief editor of the weekly
Elsevier Hendrik Jan Schoo who made him a columnist in 1993. Schoo deplored that a progressive
new class would have promoted multiculturalism, founding an anti-racist
civil religion on article 1 of the Dutch constitution, forbidding discrimination. Whereas in the early 1990s Fortuyn had held liberal views on immigration, this changed under the influence of Schoo. Dutch neocons understood that in the evermore
secularising Netherlands a change on the lines of the
Reagan Revolution had become highly improbable. Women's rights, gay rights, abortion and euthanasia had been generally accepted. In his 1995 book
De verweesde samenleving ("The orphaned society"), Fortuyn claimed that the progressive movement of the 1960s had eroded traditional norms and values. Both the roles of the "symbolic father" and the "caring mother" had been lost, leaving an orphaned population without guidance, to live out a meaningless decadent existence. However, Fortuyn did not propose a return to old socially conservative or Dutch Calvinist and iconoclastic values and argued that the media, schools and artists should provide a moral leadership, explicitly promoting and defending the new values of modern Western society, constantly recreating the Dutch identity. Fortuyn consistently retained a liberal stance on matters such as LGBT rights throughout his political career. Adopting the philosophical analysis by
Carl Schmitt, it was assumed that such an identity could only be defined in
antithesis to some actually existing concrete enemy. Inspired by
Samuel Huntington's
The Clash of Civilizations, Dutch ethnicity was to be re-invented by identifying that enemy as Islam. In his 1997 book
Tegen de islamisering van onze cultuur ("Against the islamisation of our culture"), Fortuyn proposed that after the
fall of communism a new adversary would be found in Muslim culture. Fortuyn explained the global fundamentalist wave of the 1990s as a backlash against the insecurities caused by
globalisation. The Dutch should counter
Islamic fundamentalism by promoting and defending their own
fundament, Dutch culture, especially
modernism and the
Enlightenment values. These should not yet be imposed on the Dutch population as a whole, with the exception of immigrants. Whereas American neoconservatives promoted
hard power policies in relation to the Muslim world, Dutch neocons favoured a
soft power approach. Shortly before the
September 11 attacks, Fortuyn called for a
Cold War against Islam, meaning a non-military defensive enmity. The attacks and the
war on terror made Islam a main issue in Dutch politics for the first time. Fortuyn announced his intention to run for parliament in a television interview with
EenVandaag in 2001, although he did not specify which party he would seek to stand as a candidate with. Although he was already in contact with the newly formed
Livable Netherlands (LN) party, he also considered running for the
Christian Democratic Appeal which he had worked as a consultant for, or even creating his own
list. Livable Netherlands founder
Jan Nagel subsequently invited him to run as party leader and Fortuyn was elected "
lijsttrekker" (
lead candidate) by a large majority of party members at the LN conference on 26 November 2001, prior to the
Dutch general election of 2002. In his leadership bid and general election campaign, Fortuyn attacked the mainstream parties on multiculturalism, immigration and law & order. He also called for less government interference and for a reform of the Dutch public health and education systems. Fortuyn concluded his speech by stating "at your service" in English which he later adopted as his campaign slogan during the general election. Support for LN rose dramatically during Fortuyn's brief leadership, climbing from 2% in opinion polls to about 17%. On 9 February 2002, Fortuyn gave an interview to
Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper (see below) regarding his beliefs on immigration and Islam. His statements were considered so controversial that the LN summoned him to an emergency meeting and then dismissed him as
lijsttrekker the next day after Fortuyn refused to retract his statements. Against the advice of his campaign team, Fortuyn said in the interview that he favoured closing borders to Muslim immigrants and if possible he would abolish the "peculiar article" of the Dutch constitution forbidding discrimination (at the time it was generally assumed that he referred to Article 1, the
equality before the law; it has been argued, however, that Fortuyn and the interviewer had confused this with Article 137 of the Penal Code, incitement to hatred).
Founding the LPF Having been rejected by Livable Netherlands, Fortuyn founded his own party
Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) on 14 February 2002, taking many former LN members and supporters with him. Heading the list of the
Livable Rotterdam party, considered to be the local counterpart of the LPF, he achieved a major victory in the
Rotterdam municipal council elections in early March 2002 where Fortuyn was elected to Rotterdam's municipal council. The new party won about 36% of the seats, making it the largest party in the council. For the first time since the
Second World War, the
Labour Party was out of power in
Rotterdam. Fortuyn's victory made him the subject of hundreds of interviews during the next three months, and he made many
statements about his
political ideology. In March he released his book
The Mess of Eight Purple Years (
De puinhopen van acht jaar Paars), which criticised the current political system in the Netherlands and was used as his
political agenda for the upcoming
general election. Purple is the colour to indicate a coalition government consisting of left parties (red) and conservative-liberal parties (blue). The Netherlands had been governed by such a coalition for eight years at that time. On 14 March 2002, Fortuyn was
pied by a left-wing activist from the
Biotic Baking Brigade in The Hague. The incident sparked a debate about Fortuyn's security. Fortuyn also received anonymous letters and phone calls containing death threats during the election campaign. As a result, Fortuyn began to express a fear of being injured or assassinated and accused members of the Dutch political establishment of encouraging violence against him. He described Dutch society as tolerant in appearance, not in reality. == Death ==