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Gay politicians are always proclaiming that their sexual orientation is irrelevant. Pim Fortuyn, whose meteoric rise in Dutch politics was stopped by an assassin's bullets on May 6th, declared otherwise. Being gay, for better or worse, gave the backbone to his politics.

Many Dutch thought for the better. Only three months old, Fortuyn's eponymous party, "List Pim Fortuyn" (LPF), became the second largest bloc in the parliament in its first national test on May 15th-- an unprecedented upset in an election that's usually a staid game of musical chairs. Fortuyn's party gained a sympathy vote following its leader's murder at the hands of an animal-rights extremist-- Fortuyn favored decriminalizing the raising of animals for their fur. But his good showing also reflected how the cigar-smoking former sociology professor with a shaved head and high-camp style had turned Dutch politics upside down in his months on the hustings.

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"This is a full country," Fortuyn said. "I think 16 million Dutchmen are about enough." Fortuyn wasn't mouthing that certain homosexual skepticism about children; he was expressing a hostility to immigration-- particularly of Muslims-- that grounded his success. The LPF appealed to a sense among many Dutch that their cities are getting dangerous and social services declining.

Fortuyn, who was 54 when he was killed in the parking lot of a radio station in Hilversum after a broadcast interview, came to notice first in Rotterdam, home to many naturalized Dutch. He rose to head a small party, Livable Netherlands, which, in an upset, won more than a third of the vote in a city council race in February. But the party broke with Fortuyn over his support for revising article one of the Dutch constitution, banning discrimination. In February, Fortuyn founded his own party. In national elections, voters cast ballots only for a party, which draws up a list of candidates, the number seated depending on its proportion of the vote. LPF put its namesake at the top.

With its postures against crime and immigrants, the international media lumped Fortuyn together with France's Jean-Marie Le Pen-- who bested Socialist then-prime minister Lionel Jospin in an election April 21st and urges "repatriation" of immigrants-- and Austria's Joerg Haider, who's been known to downplay the Holocaust. But Fortuyn hotly rejected such comparisons. Immigration to Holland needed to be stopped for a wholly liberal reason, he contended: in order to preserve a hard-won Dutch culture of tolerance and equality.

"I have gay friends who have been beaten up by young Moroccans in Rotterdam," he told the UK Guardian. "We need to integrate these people; they need to accept that, in Holland, gender equality and tolerance of different lifestyle is very, very important to us."

Muslim immigrants to Holland-- some 800,000 people-- hadn't assimilated to Dutch society, Fortuyn declared, and weren't likely to as things stood. His 1997 book Against the Islamisation of Our Society argued that Islam failed to see a separation between mosque and state and hadn't pulled itself up, by Reformation and Enlightenment, out of theocracy. Immigrants were sticking to urban ghettos, enjoying generous social services, not learning Dutch, and constituting a crime-prone, hostile underclass.

Fortuyn insisted he wasn't racist or unreasonable. Those already in Holland should stay, he said. Immigration should be immediately cut back, from 40,000 a year to 10,000, before being stopped altogether, and immigrants should be required to learn Dutch.

The problem of so many foreigners was already being discussed in pubs and living rooms, even in academia, Fortuyn said, but not yet in politics. "The trouble is that I'm an academic who went into politics," he said.

Just a pretty picture?

But in politicizing ethnic and religious identity, Fortuyn broke a taboo. A grim-faced toleration-- not exactly a celebration of-- religious difference goes back centuries in Holland. In the post-war era, the regime of tolerance received a fillip from the country's suffering under Nazi occupation-- but also from guilt over its complicity. Dutch Nazis helped send the country's Jews to extermination camps with exceptional speed and thoroughness. After the war, race- or faith-baiting was politically anathema, not least for the murky issues it raised about the recent past. Fortuyn's support was strongest among the young-- half of voters ages 18-30 said they supported him-- for whom the war was ancient history and who agreed unease had squelched vital political questions.

Critics said racists used Fortuyn's campaign as a cover. At one of the demonstrations that broke out after the killing, some of his angry young supporters reportedly hailed him as "Fuehrer." The candidate himself had insisted he wasn't bigoted and that open discussion could smoke racists out.

But was Fortuyn's rendition of the "clash-of-civilizations" thesis, even if free of racist taint, on target? Over centuries of engagement, Islamic societies often have been more tolerant and cosmopolitan than their Christian cousins. Turks welcomed Jews expelled from Spain in the Inquisition. While Western-style gay scenes are verboten in Muslim societies, homoerotics are woven everywhere into social fabric. The image of a suppressed Islamic womanhood is countered by female rulers recently in Pakistan and Indonesia, or the fact that in Ayatollah-led Iran more than half of university students are girls. Islamic immigrants in the Americas have become just-another-patch in the ethnic quilt. And anyway aren't Muslim immigrants in Europe poetic payback for centuries of often brutal colonialization?

But if Fortuyn painted Islam with a broad brush and primary colors, the problem of how a society addresses a cultural minority that's an angry, excluded underclass is unavoidable. In European cities there's a growing sense among voters that such an underclass has developed, even if it was politically incorrect to talk about it. Even America, the world's biggest mulitcultural melting pot, has not solved the problem of long-term social exclusion on the basis of race and class. And to the extent America has dulled the sharp edge of cultural difference, it's been through mass-market homogenization that is unappealing to many Europeans. Should the shopping mall everywhere supplant the piazza, and Starbucks the kaffeehaus? Fear of losing local culture, concern about the hungry masses to the south and east, and suspicion of Diktat from Washington and Brussels are all feeding the electoral tumult in Europe this season.

Made in the USA?

Yet what Fortuyn brought to the table was in part American-style, telegenic politics-of-the-personality. Dutch governments are usually cobbled together by parliamentary coalitions of minority parties, which have to compromise and work together. The result was the backdrop of sober, deliberate, and-- by some lights-- colorless politics against which Fortuyn's flamboyance scintillated.

Out on the edge

However Fortuyn wasn't a demagogue who tuned his rhetoric by the applause-o-meter. In his biography he talked about about a young man who made eyes at him in the park when he was a boy. "He didn't do me any harm," Fortuyn wrote. "On the contrary, he showed me something that was incomprehensibly exciting and I could feel and touch it, but today we are ready to interfere with complete teams of professionals. By interfering in such an irritating and grown-up way in the world of children, we make an enormous problem of something that for a child is no problem at all and is only exciting."

Fortuyn was among the only Dutch public figures who defended the late Edward Brongersma, a former Dutch senator whose gay archive was seized by police in 1999 on the grounds that it contained images of minors-- the largest destruction of a homosexual archive since the Nazis burned the collection of Magnus Hirschfeld in 1933.

Though they now could be king-makers in the Dutch parliament, LPF's MPs are politically inexperienced and rudderless. Its message having struck such a chord with voters, the party will find another to serve as standard bearer-- but likely not with the flourish of Pim Fortuyn.