Twenty-one years ago this week, Pim Fortuyn was being talked of as a future prime minister of Holland. The general election was a week away, and the man described by the Observer as the ‘Gay Mr Right’ had the coalition centre-left government running scared. Everyone from the BBC to the Daily Telegraph to the New York Times was beating a path to the door of the flamboyant 54-year-old former sociology professor.
‘Highly articulate, telegenic, oozing charisma, he has wiped the floor with establishment politicians in TV debates and his views seem to strike a chord with many in the most densely populated country in Europe,’ reported the Observer.
The New York Times visited Rotterdam, where in local elections in March 2002 Fortuyn’s party had become the city’s dominant force. It was intrigued to discover how a bourgeois homosexual could be such a hit in a ‘gritty port…with a reputation for sober, hard-working people’.
Fortuyn laughed off accusations of bigotry from his political opponents
Its correspondent asked around and discovered that the city’s inhabitants were fed up with rising street crime, which some blamed on immigrants.
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