Until he got onto the subject of Islam there was nothing remotely ‘right wing’ about Pim Fortuyn. A Marxist university professor and a gay man, Fortuyn was also a high-profile advocate of promiscuity and almost every other libertarian attitude. Only once he got onto the subject of Islam did he become ‘right wing’. His 1997 book Against the Islamisation of our Culture focused on the range of challenges that he said Islam posed to Dutch society.5 All were issues that had until then been campaigning points of the political left.

They included the fact that Islam had not achieved the separation of church and state which had been the achievement of Dutch Christianity – a separation that gave the Dutch not only freedom of speech, freedom of the press and other human rights but without which the public space had no guard against clerical intrusion based on ‘holy’ texts. Another of Fortuyn’s principal objections to Islam was the difference in attitude towards the sexes. He argued that Muslim women in Holland should have the same right to emancipation as all other Dutch women. And he seized with fury upon Islamic attitudes towards sexual minorities. Dutch society had led the world in passing legislation and creating a culture in which equality between men and women and between heterosexuals and homosexuals had become the norm. The practices of Muslim-majority countries demonstrated, with varying degrees of austerity, that these principles were not compatible with Islam. Yet despite these obvious clashes, Dutch society was trying to pretend that its own tolerance could coexist with the intolerance of the fastest-growing portion of Dutch society. Fortuyn felt that it could not.

Through his newspaper columns and on popular television programmes, Fortuyn became a master not only at expressing his own views, but also at teasing out the views of other people. On a television discussion show he acted as flamboyantly as he could in front of a Dutch Imam until the Imam exploded in rage over Fortuyn’s homosexuality. Mainstream Dutch politicians also told him what they thought of him. During a television debate in 1997 about his ‘Islamisation’ book the leading Labour Party politician and former cabinet minister Marcel van Damn told Fortuyn, ‘You are an extremely inferior human being.’6 It was only a taste of the vitriol to come.

By the time of the 9/11 attacks in America, Dutch society had been around the central parts of this discussion several times and Fortuyn had begun to devote his energy to politics. He was expelled from the party he had joined when he described Islam as an achterlijk (‘backward’) culture, but promptly started his own political party, Lijst Pim Fortuyn (LPF). Because of its voting system Dutch politics, more than perhaps any other country in Europe, is comparatively easy for new outsider parties to break into. In a matter of weeks in the lead-up to the 2002 national elections Fortuyn upturned the whole of Dutch politics.