56 Facts About Pim Fortuyn

Wilhelmus Simon Petrus Fortuijn, known as Pim Fortuyn, was a Dutch politician, author, civil servant, businessman, sociologist and academic who founded the party Pim Fortuyn List in 2002.

Pim Fortuyn then became prominent in the Netherlands as a press columnist, writer and media commentator.

Pim Fortuyn called Islam "a backward culture", and was quoted as saying that if it were legally possible, he would close the borders for Muslim immigrants.

Pim Fortuyn supported tougher measures against crime and opposed state bureaucracy, wanting to reduce the Dutch financial contribution to the European Union.

Pim Fortuyn was labelled a far-right populist by his opponents and in the media, but he fiercely rejected this label.

Pim Fortuyn was openly homosexual and a supporter of gay rights.

Pim Fortuyn explicitly distanced himself from "far-right" politicians such as the Belgian Filip Dewinter, Austrian Jorg Haider, or Frenchman Jean-Marie Le Pen whenever compared to them.

Pim Fortuyn criticised the polder model and the policies of the outgoing government of Wim Kok and repeatedly described himself and LPF's ideology as pragmatic and not populistic.

Pim Fortuyn was assassinated during the 2002 Dutch national election campaign by Volkert van der Graaf, a left-wing environmentalist and animal rights activist.

In court at his trial, van der Graaf said he murdered Pim Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting Muslims as "scapegoats" and targeting "the weak members of society" in seeking political power.

Pim Fortuyn's father worked as a salesman and his mother was a housewife.

Pim Fortuyn attended Mendelcollege secondary school in Haarlem where he was described as an academically gifted pupil.

Pim 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.

Pim Fortuyn was an employee of the Groningen University Newspaper for which he wrote columns.

Pim Fortuyn was a Marxist at the time and sympathized with the Communist Party of the Netherlands, although he never became a full member.

In 1989 Pim Fortuyn became director of a government organisation administering student transport cards and worked as an advisor to the Social and Economic Council.

Pim Fortuyn 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.

Pim Fortuyn was openly gay, and said in a 2002 interview that he was Catholic.

In 1992, Pim Fortuyn wrote Aan het volk van Nederland, 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.

In 1989, Pim 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.

Whereas in the early 1990s Pim Fortuyn had held liberal views on immigration, this changed under the influence of Schoo.

However, Pim 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.

Pim Fortuyn consistently retained a liberal stance on matters such as LGBT rights throughout his political career.

Pim Fortuyn explained the global fundamentalist wave of the 1990s as a backlash against the insecurities caused by globalisation.

Pim Fortuyn announced his intention to run for parliament in a television interview in 2001, although he did not specify which party he would seek to stand as a candidate with.

Livable Netherlands founder Jan Nagel subsequently invited him to run as party leader and Pim Fortuyn was elected "lijsttrekker" by a large majority of party members at the LN conference on 26 November 2001, prior to the Dutch general election of 2002.

Pim Fortuyn called for less government interference and for a reform of the Dutch public health and education systems.

On 9 February 2002, Pim Fortuyn gave an interview to Volkskrant, a Dutch newspaper regarding his beliefs on immigration and Islam.

Pim Fortuyn's statements were considered so controversial that LN dismissed him as lijsttrekker the next day.

Pim 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.

On 14 March 2002, Pim Fortuyn was pied by a left-wing activist from the Biotic Baking Brigade in The Hague.

On 6 May 2002, at age 54, Pim Fortuyn was assassinated by gunshot in Hilversum, North Holland, by Volkert van der Graaf.

The attack took place in a car park outside a radio studio where Pim Fortuyn had just given an interview.

On 15 April 2003, he was convicted of assassinating Pim Fortuyn and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

Pim Fortuyn was released on parole in May 2014 after serving two-thirds of his sentence, the standard procedure under the Dutch penal system.

Pim Fortuyn was re-interred on 20 July 2002, at San Giorgio della Richinvelda, in the province of Pordenone in Italy, where he had owned a house.

Pim Fortuyn said that Muslims in the Netherlands needed to accept living together with the Dutch, and that if this was unacceptable for them, then they were free to leave.

Pim Fortuyn said that the Netherlands, with a population of 16 million, had enough inhabitants, and the practice of allowing as many as 40,000 asylum-seekers into the country each year had to be stopped.

Pim Fortuyn claimed that if he became part of the next government, he would pursue a restrictive immigration policy while granting citizenship to a large group of illegal immigrants.

Pim Fortuyn said that he did not intend to "unload our Moroccan hooligans" onto the Moroccan King Hassan.

Pim Fortuyn distanced himself from Hans Janmaat of the Centrum Democraten, who in the 1980s wanted to remove all foreigners from the country and was repeatedly convicted for discrimination and hate speech.

Pim Fortuyn proposed that all people who already resided in the Netherlands would be allowed to stay, provided the immigrants adopted the Dutch society's consensus on human rights as their own.

Pim Fortuyn stated: "not integrating means leaving" and "the borders have to be hermetically closed".

Pim Fortuyn said "If it were legally possible, I'd say no more Muslims will get in here", claiming that the influx of Muslims would threaten freedoms in the liberal Dutch society.

Pim Fortuyn used the word achterlijk, literally meaning "backward", but commonly used as an insult in the sense of "retarded".

Pim Fortuyn wrote Against the Islamization of Our Culture.

Pim Fortuyn held liberal views favouring the drug policy of the Netherlands, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, and related positions.

Pim Fortuyn expressed support for the state of Israel throughout his political career.

The LPF won support from some ethnic minorities; one of Pim Fortuyn's closest associates was of Cape Verdean origin, and one of the party's MPs was a young woman of Turkish descent.

Pim Fortuyn was compared with the politicians Jorg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the foreign press.

Pim Fortuyn explicitly distanced himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and criticised some of his policies, including Le Pen's downplaying of the Holocaust.

In domestic politics, Pim Fortuyn distanced his views from hard-right Dutch politicians such as Hans Janmaat and Joop Glimmerveen by maintaining that if he came to power, he would pardon existing illegal immigrants if they had lived in the Netherlands for over five years and offer them a path to citizenship if they could be assimilated into society.

The 2002 elections, only weeks after Pim Fortuyn's death, were marked by large losses for the liberal People's Party for Freedom and Democracy and especially the social democratic Labour Party ; both parties replaced their leaders shortly after their losses.

Contemporary Dutch politics is more polarized than it has been in recent years, especially on the issues for which Pim Fortuyn was best known.

Pim Fortuyn had advocated for a one-time amnesty for those asylum seekers who had resided in the Netherlands for an extended period.

In 2004, in a TV show, Pim Fortuyn was chosen as De Grootste Nederlander, followed closely by William of Orange, the leader of the independence war that established the precursor to the present-day Netherlands.