BRUSSELS, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- Two-and-a-half years after he was assassinated, populist anti-immigration leader Pim Fortuyn still casts a long shadow over the Netherlands. In a TV poll Monday, the openly gay former columnist was voted the greatest Dutchman ever, beating painters Rembrandt and Vincent Van Gogh, Jewish diarist Anne Frank, football legend Johan Cruyff and Prince William of Orange to the top spot.
The result, based on the votes of more than 400,000 viewers, provoked decidedly mixed reactions in the Netherlands.
"I am fairly disappointed that a large majority of voters are stupid enough to elect Pim Fortuyn as the foremost Dutch leader," said Alfred Pyper, an analyst at the Clingendael Institute for International Relations in The Hague. "I had hoped most Dutch people would be able to distinguish between leaders and populist politicians."
However, Mandy Smit -- a spokesperson for the List Pim Fortuyn party -- said she was "very pleased the Dutch public wanted him No. 1. It shows his ideas are very much alive."
The verdict of the TV poll may be debatable, but it speaks volumes about the current feeling of unease and insecurity in the Netherlands, a prosperous country of 15 million people in northwest Europe.
In a similar survey in Britain, wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton ever, while in Germany they plumped for post-war premier Konrad Adenauer -- both respected statesmen, political visionaries and founding fathers of the present-day European Union. In Holland, the public opted for a controversial former journalist and lecturer who never held public office and caused a storm of protest by declaring "The Netherlands is full" and "Islam is a backward religion."
"The question is what meaning 'the greatest Dutchman' has for this society at this moment," said journalist Yoeri Albrecht, who was Fortuyn's advocate during the broadcast on the NOS public channel. "That's why Pim Fortuyn at this moment is the greatest Dutchman ... Just look at what happened in the last 14 days."
Two weeks ago, Theo van Gogh -- a maverick filmmaker known for his outspoken attacks on Islam -- was slain in central Amsterdam by a radical Muslim who is also suspected of plotting last year to assassinate former Portuguese premier and incoming European Commission chief Jose-Manuel Barroso. The killing sparked a wave of retaliatory reprisals that have seen mosques burnt to the ground, churches set alight and Muslim schools torched in this traditionally tolerant, peace-loving and multicultural country.
Van Gogh was putting the finishing touches to a film about Fortuyn when he was shot and it is not difficult to see why he -- and millions of other Dutch men and women -- fell under "Professor Pim's" spell.
With his shaven head, dapper suits and high-camp style, Fortuyn certainly looked different from most other Dutch politicians. He also had radically different view about how the Netherlands should be run. He argued for a more restrictive immigration policy, an end to government red tape and a crackdown on crime. But at the same time, he favored greater healthcare spending and extra effort to integrate foreigners who had already settled in the country.
"I don't believe in the separation of left and right," he told United Press International three days before he was gunned down by an animal-rights campaigner. "In the modern world, it is a question of good versus bad, new or old-fashioned and whether it works or not that counts."
It appeared to be a winning formula with voters, who flocked to the List Pim Fortuyn in droves. Shortly before he was killed in May 2002, polls showed his grouping gaining almost 20 percent of the vote and in the election that followed the LPF entered government along with two other center-right parties.
Support for the LPF party has hemorrhaged since its leader died in Holland's first political assassination in three centuries, but Fortuyn's ideas live on. Geert Wilders, a renegade Liberal thrown out of his party for attacking Islam, has seen his support double to 13 percent since Van Gogh's murder. The center-right government of Jan-Peter Balkenende has also clamped down on illegal immigrants, stepped up efforts to integrate the Netherlands' 1 million Muslims into Dutch society and launched a nationwide debate about Dutch values.
"After a decade in which opinion was a closed shop, Pim Fortuyn opened the doors," says Pyper. "The taboo of discussing the negative aspects of Islam and immigration has disappeared and that's an achievement. At the same time, people are asking: what are the limits of free speech? We certainly can't tolerate everything -- limits should be put on what people say, even if they are artists."
There is little sympathy in the Netherlands for Fortuyn or Van Gogh's more outrageous comments about Islam, but the mood is certainly hardening toward immigrants who refuse to accept cherished Dutch values such as the separation between church and state, equality between men and women and the right to express one's sexuality openly and freely. In a recent opinion poll, nine out of 10 Dutch people agreed their country was becoming less tolerant and 40 percent "hoped" Muslims would "no longer feel at home here."
"The Dutch had always been convinced they lived in one of the most stable, peaceful countries in Europe," wrote political scientist Phillip van Praag last year in an essay entitled "How the Dutch lost their innocence." "The tradition of accommodation and compromise, of consensus democracy, made every conflict manageable and solvable and seemed to enable the smooth integration of large groups of western immigrants. By the end of the long and eventful year of 2002, that self-satisfied image was in tatters." After the brutal slaying of van Gogh and the burning of mosques and churches that followed, this cozy image is not just in tatters, it is up in smoke.
