Forever Young and Beautiful

Weekly Review: The murder of Pim Fortuyn was a tragedy, but could the mourning lead to another?

It was another one of those weeks that sent Europe reeling out of kilter. Even as the French were patting themselves on the back Sunday evening for sending Jean-Marie Le Pen back to what they hoped would be obscurity (it won't be), Pim Fortuyn was gunned down the very next day in the Netherlands.

Just as shocking that there would be such a thing as a political assassination in a country that has made tolerance part and parcel of its identity was the very idea that Pim Fortuyn had become a figure significant enough to assassinate. "Who was Pim Fortuyn anyway?" asks Neal Ascherson in his engaging taxonomy of the new European right-wing populism in The Observer.

What the man who called himself an "aesthetic and grassroots democrat, a spoiled brat and desperado, a dadaist and chief gladiator" (FAZ) certainly was not was your basic run-of-the-mill right-winger. Outside of Holland, the mainstream media was all too quick set Fortuyn in the tradition of Haider in Austria, Berlusconi in Italy and Le Pen in France. Prompted by early Net settler Adam Curry's fury at that the all-too-easy classification, many in that virtual nowhereland Cory Doctorow calls "Blogistan" have taken it upon themselves to help him debunk it.

There's a danger here, though, that the debunking of one myth can snowball right up into another. The Lady Di effect was certainly in full force on the day of Fortuyn's funeral on Friday when thousands of all political stripes came with their candles, flowers and condolences. In Telepolis, Günther Hack calls this the Pim-Dean Syndrome -- like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, Fortuyn is destined to remain forever young and beautiful.

But while Fortuyn's politics may have been an invigoratingly fresh grab-bag, if there was one single message he unfailingly put out, it was that he wanted the flow of immigrants to his country stopped. On this issue at least, Fortuyn and his followers do fall into the category of a xenophobic nationalism that seems to be spreading like a proverbial wildfire from Central Europe to even the smoky coffeehouses and red light districts of tolerant Holland.

And it's setting off alarms not just among Social Democrats and New Labourers, but throughout the traditional political parties of Europe. As he told The Guardian, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder has put the rise of the right at the top of the agenda of his Sunday night meeting in Berlin with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The concern is undoubtedly genuine, but so, too, surely, is the promise of Schröder's challenger, Edmund Stoiber, to make immigration the central issue of the campaign leading up to national elections in Germany in September.

Immigrants to Europe aren't just widely distrusted, derided and despised. They're often killed, Hack reminds us, and "the days of the candlelit demonstrations are over; there are no more emotional downtown parades, no services in the cathedrals... The death of Pim Fortuyn was senseless. But so, too, is the Pim-Dean Syndrome."

Elsewhere

The Nation sorts through the complexities of immigration politics in Europe and Germany.