The Center-Left PvdA Labor led by Prime Minister Wim Kok, who ran the Netherlands with a coalition government for eight years got 23 seats, barely half as many as they won four years ago. (Kok announced his resignation from Dutch politics before the poll; successor Ad Melkert resigned after the announcement of last night’s results.) The big winner—if that’s the right word under the circumstances—is the center-right Christian Democrats, which, with 45 seats, will now need to form a government with List Pim Fortuyn, as Fortuyn’s party is called, and at least one other party on the right.
Forming a new government could take days, weeks—perhaps even longer. But whatever the resulting government looks like, it has a clear mandate from the voters: change. The electorate—-though not of one mind, as yesterday’s vote also made clear—-seems particularly insistent of a wholesale rethink of Dutch immigration policies. As a candidate, Fortuyn himself delivered a mixed message on immigration. He and his party were routinely, and simplistically, portrayed as anti-immigration. “The Netherlands is full,” he famously said. But he also said he welcomed immigrants—as long as they conformed to certain norms of Dutch society.
Confused? The Netherlands, like all of Western Europe, depends on immigration to keep its economy humming and to support costs like pensions for an aging population. Fortuyn was pragmatic enough to recognize that need. Where Fortuyn was unequivocal was on the question of the integration of immigrants into Dutch society. He argued that in a society founded on the principle of equality, cultural preferences and differences matter if they collide with fundamental Dutch values.
Fortuyn, for example, demanded that mainstream Dutch leaders consider whether the treatment of women (at least by Western standards) as second-class citizens—including such practices as arranged marriages and female circumcision—have a place in Dutch society. Even people who disagreed with his tough line respected him for speaking his mind when other politicians, bowing to what many voters saw as political correctness, refused to do so.
The big question now in the Netherlands is, what is List Pim Fortuyn without Pim Fortuyn? After some infighting over who would succeed him, the party today chose Mat Herben, an ex-journalist and former defense ministry spokesman, as Fortuyn’s successor. But even Dutch politicos who valued Fortuyn’s political straight talk wonder whether the party can hang together without him. The list of candidates who ran under his banner was put together so quickly that “not everybody was vetted as well as they should have been,” says a knowledgeable criminal-justice source. “We could have some scandals before this is all over.” That’s exactly what the Netherlands doesn’t need right now.
