Working people and middle-class layers were sucked into similar spectacles of "adoring crowds" in other cities.

Fortuyn was shot five times with a handgun outside a radio station by a left-wing activist, identified so far as a person who worked for Ecology Offensive, an "animal liberation" group. He has refused to make a statement about his motives.

Prime Minister Wim Kok kicked off the nationalist outpouring in an address in which he stated he felt "devastated by this. What went through my head is, ‘This is the Netherlands, the Netherlands, a nation of tolerance,’" and added that the killings were a blow to "our nation" and "our democracy." The election was called as a result of the Kok government offering its resignation after a scandal in which it was revealed troops from the Netherlands allowed rightist Serbian nationalist forces to carry out a massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.

The Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy and an imperialist country with direct colonies in the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba.

After the assassination all political parties suspended their election campaigns. Photographs in the press showed posters covered over out of respect for the slain rightist.

Fortuyn, who formed the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF) party just a few months ago, presented himself as an "outsider" representing the little guy against the "self-important political elite" of the ruling Dutch parties. The LPF’s popularity ratings soared as his campaign seized on insecurities in the middle class and layers of working people buffeted by the world capitalist social and economic crisis.

Once a professor of sociology who said he had Marxist views, Fortuyn was fired from the leadership of the Livable Netherlands party for statements unfavorable to Islam and for proposing that a constitutional clause banning discrimination be set aside. At the time of this death, Fortuyn’s party was polling among the top three contenders, and it continued to pick up steam as election day neared.

The country is currently ruled by a coalition government of the Labor Party, Liberal Party, and Democrats ‘66. As these parties have proven incapable of ameliorating the impact of the creeping social crisis on workers, farmers, and middle-class layers, Fortuyn received a hearing among a broad spectrum of the population.

Fortuyn used his liberal background and the fact that he is gay to try and put a progressive coloring to his reactionary proposals. At the center of his appeal was posturing as a defender of women against what he portrayed as a backward and threatening immigrant tide of Muslim peoples whose treatment of women threatens to undermine progress registered in the country over the past decades.

"Cultural developments which are diametrically opposed to the desired integration and emancipation, such as arranged marriages, or revenge and female circumcision, must be fought." he said. "Discrimination against women in fundamentalist Islamic circles is particularly unacceptable."

Right-wing sociologists in the Netherlands accuse first-generation Algerian and Moroccan youth, primarily raised by single mothers, as being "decultured." They falsely claim Muslim women are never allowed to discipline any of their male children, contributing to criminal behavior.

Fortuyn pounded away at the need to defend "the nation" and "Dutch culture," proclaiming, "Large groups in the community are lagging behind in social and cultural terms. These groups often originate from countries which did not participate in the Judeo-Christian-humanist developments which have been taking place in Europe for centuries. These shortfalls in development are highly regrettable." He called for "maximum resistance" to immigration and denying entry to refugees as a solution.  
 
Extent of immigration
Nearly 10 percent of the country’s 16 million people are not of Dutch or European descent, the highest rate in Western Europe. In Rotterdam, a working-class city of 600,000 where Fortuyn lived, 45 percent of the population is foreign-born.

Seizing on the large-scale immigration from predominately Muslim countries, Fortuyn said, "If I could arrange it legally, I would simply say: no more Muslims can come in.... I think 16 million Dutch is enough. The country is full."

Using the Muslim population as a scapegoat for rising crime rates, Fortuyn called for "public order and safety" to make the streets "safe" again. He projected putting more cops on the streets and giving the military police the same powers of regular cops to arrest working people. Regarding the border patrol, he said by "adding police and customs officers, the capacity of these flying squads could be doubled in a year."

Fortuyn made a distinction between halting immigration and pressing those immigrants who wanted to stay to learn the Dutch language and adopt "Western traditions." Press reports have noted that layers of the immigrant population in the country were attracted to Fortuyn’s proposals to curb crime and take steps to better integrate immigrants currently in the country. In one mosque 20 percent of ballots were cast for Fortuyn in a recent election. One news reporter interviewed two Turkish women who voted for "the professor" because "their neighborhood had become dangerous because of newcomers."

His chief deputy, and now the party’s new leader, Joao Varela, is a Black businessman and an immigrant from the Cape Verde islands, located off the coast of West Africa.  
 
Parallels from U.S. history
Like other rightists who are campaigning for a halt to immigration in France, Austria, and other countries in Europe, Fortuyn’s proposals are not outside the channels of bourgeois politics.

After several decades of massive immigration into the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, layers of the capitalist class began organizing to severely limit immigration and completely exclude working people from whole regions of the earth from being able to gain legal access to U.S. territory.

The Immigration Act of 1917 for the first time established a literacy test, which the U.S. Congress hoped would significantly limit immigration. The law also expanded racial discrimination against Asians by defining a geographic "barred zone" that excluded working people from India and most other parts of Asia, except for Japan and the Philippines.

The first law that was successful in severely limiting immigration came in 1921, as the U.S. rulers moved to put the brakes on the numbers of people allowed into the country in order to assimilate those already there. Quotas for various nationalities were established, cutting total European immigration to 350,000 a year compared to slightly less than 1 million a year before World War I. Northern Europeans were favored over those from southern and eastern Europe and the prohibition of Asians from the "barred zone" as well as all Chinese continued.

The Immigration Act of 1924 further restricted immigration, limiting the total from Europe to 164,000. The basic elements of the quota system were left in place until the Immigration Act of 1965, which ended the official bias against immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe.  
Stand on European Union
During his campaign, Fortuyn demonstratively tried to distance himself from ultrarightists like Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria. While calling for defense of the Netherlands’ sovereignty, he spoke in favor of remaining in the European Union, demanding a reduction in "the bureaucracy in Brussels," where the EU is headquartered. He avoided anti-Semitic scapegoating in his speeches. In regards to the Palestinian struggle, he demonstratively spoke out in favor of Israel and the steps it has taken to try to crush the liberation struggle there.

Frustration among working people is growing over the declining quality of government-funded social services and the bureaucracy of a social-welfare capitalist state. Tapping into genuine outrage over what he called "a highly disappointing health-care system...burdened with a huge bureaucracy ...with its waiting lists resulting in unnecessary deaths," he proposed steps to dismantle public medical care and expand privatization. He offered a similar proposal to confront the deteriorating education system.

Disabled workers have the right to receive government assistance under Dutch law. Fortuyn, claiming that 1 million people are on disability, campaigned to limit benefits to only those with work-related illnesses. He projected programs to also cut those workers off disability.

With the abrupt death of Fortuyn, the ruling class in the Netherlands has seized on the moment to help whip up an outpouring of Dutch nationalism and cover up the division of social classes that exists in the country. Labor Party prime minister Wim Kok and a senior representative of Queen Beatrix attended the funeral mass. Tens of thousands of people lined his funeral procession May 10 as thousands raised their hands in the air chanting, "Pim Fortuyn, Pim Fortuyn," and sang "You’ll Never Walk Alone," a popular support song for the Rotterdam soccer team.  
 
 
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