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May 16, 2002 8:45 a.m. Giulianizing Holland The election results.

he Dutch-election results are in, and it appears that the Netherlands has taken a decisive turn to the right. Context, alas, is everything: Dutch conservatism is weak tea: The victorious Christian Democratic Alliance generally supports the welfare state, and upholds the broad national consensus backing the kind of social liberalism that bears no resemblance to the "Christian conservatives" we Americans are used to. Still, the resurrection of the Christian Democrats, who were humiliatingly ousted in favor of a left-wing coalition in 1994, as well as the astonishing rise of the fledgling List Pim Fortuyn party is a hopeful sign for conservative politics not only in the Netherlands.

Holland, it seems, is getting Giulianized. The establishment-conservative CD and the populist LPF won big because Dutch voters lost faith in the Labor-led coalition's leadership on several key law-and-order issues: welfare abuse, drug policy, lax policing, and most famously, immigration, which the outspoken rookie politician Pim Fortuyn, assassinated nine days before balloting, forced onto the national agenda.

Fortuyn, a libertarian who broke the social taboo against criticizing immigrants from the Third World, made his reputation by saying the densely populated nation couldn't afford its generous immigration policy, and was endangering liberal democracy by importing large numbers of Muslims whose beliefs were antithetical to the kind of tolerant pluralism cherished by the Dutch.

While the LPF didn't do as well as it probably would have had Fortuyn not been killed — it is now in a three-way tie with Labor and the Liberals as the No. 2 party in government — its success is the story of this election, and perhaps the European political story of the year. Remember, the List Pim Fortuyn didn't even exist months ago. It went into this election without its leader, who had been its raison d'etre. Without Fortuyn's eloquence and forceful personality, voters could have reasonably concluded that the neophyte candidates on his list wouldn't stand much of a chance of implementing his policies, particularly since the Dutch political establishment is so resistant to them.

"I would have voted for Pim, but I'm going for the Christian Democrats," one Amsterdam voter told me on election eve. "I didn't want to throw my vote away, and I think a lot of Dutch people felt the same way. But I think this next government will be unstable, because it won't really represent what the people think."

The Christian Democrats are more moderate on immigration than was Fortuyn, who advocated halting it for the time being, and in aggressively promoting the assimilation of the substantial immigrant population already in country, particularly the Muslims. But the establishment parties, many of whom joined the press in absurdly demonizing Fortuyn as a neo-fascist, will now have to assimilate the views of Fortuyn supporters. The anti-establishment message Fortuyn's constituency sent to the political class is impossible to ignore.

Of more lasting significance, Fortuyn — a gay, nationalist free-marketeer — made it possible for the conformist Dutch polity to speak openly about their concerns regarding problems with immigrant populations. Before Fortuyn, it was nearly impossible to criticize the behavior dark-skinned immigrants in Dutch society, for fear of being denounced as a racist. "Those days are over," said a Haarlem voter. "We can't go back."

Why should American conservatives care about an election in a tiny country in northern Europe, one whose right wing is farther to the left than many Democrats?

First, these results, tracking as they do with political developments in other European countries, are a wake-up call for the statist Eurocratic establishment, which is increasingly out of touch with voters. Had Fortuyn not been murdered, he may well have been the country's next prime minister. As it stands, the established parties will now have to be more responsive to the electorate, which is increasingly skeptical of their collusion in the transfer of national sovereignty to Brussels. Fortuyn's moderate calls for a rollback of centralized state authority within Dutch borders were also highly significant, as was his extolling of individual responsibility.

Second, the Fortuyn phenomenon, which arose in one of the most liberal countries in Europe, signals that European voters may be willing to confront the serious problem their nations have with immigration and loss of national identity. With birth rates plummeting, Europe will have no choice but to reign in its welfare state, but it will also have to continue to accept immigrants. The Fortuyn vote signals that European voters are getting serious about both requiring and helping immigrants to assimilate. They will also, in this time of war being waged on the West by militant Islam, have to be careful who they let into their countries. Fortuyn voters are liberals who have been mugged by multicultural reality.

Finally, the Fortuyn vote represents European disaffection with multiculturalist dogma — ironically, in the Dutch case, in the name of liberalism. Fortuyn attacked Islam as an openly gay man who was troubled by the growing presence of Holland of a disaffected, semi-radical element whose religious beliefs reject settled Dutch views on the proper role of law, democracy, women, homosexuals, and non-Muslims. Certainly Fortuyn's squalid personal life, and even his pro-drug, pro-euthanasia politics, was anathema to most on the American right. Yet few politicians in ultraliberal Holland would be at all satisfactory to American social conservatives, who in any case don't have to live there.

For the American right, Fortuyn was admirable because he was fundamentally a small-d democrat who believed that Western culture was superior and worth defending. He had the courage to stand up to a totalitarian religious ideology, and call it what it is: a present and future threat to liberty. (This, as Linda Chavez writes, is not just a problem in Europe, but also here). A recovery of confidence in Western values and Western institutions in Europe is critical to the long-term success of the war on Islamic terrorism, which President Bush has warned could go on for decades.

For this, Fortuyn was called a racist by the knee-jerk Left, particularly in the media. But many Dutch voters saw through the smear, and knew he was no Jean-Marie Le Pen. The iconoclastic Fortuyn cracked the familiar mold of the nationalist politician as anti-Semite, and made anti-immigration views politically respectable. As John O'Sullivan writes in the new NR, the Fortuyn phenomenon is the clearest evidence yet that new realities are breaking up old political alliances and habits of mind.

But not for everyone. Here's a typical example: Michelangelo Signorile, the gay New York Press columnist, professes astonishment that American conservative pundits and publications have "canonized" Fortuyn. He cannot understand why people like me think Fortuyn's was a salutary presence in European politics. Right-wingers are supposed to hate gays, after all, so our appreciation of Fortuyn can only be because we disapprove of Muslims, and want to round them up in camps at the first opportunity.

This is precisely the kind of multiculturalist dogmatism that Fortuyn fought constantly. It insists that to think and speak critically about the ideas and practices of a Third World minority group is ultimately malign and racist. It demands that people think and act politically within inflexible categories. Has Signorile, a New Yorker, not been paying attention for the past eight years? Rudolph Giuliani was a social liberal but a reformist, law-and-order Republican for whom many New York Democrats voted because they were sick and tired of the urban, welfare liberalism that had turned their city into a dirty, crime-ridden, ungovernable mess. Quality-of-life issues mattered more to them than Giuliani's personality or party affiliation. He delivered, and he was reelected in a landslide. What few traditional conservatives there are in the city may not have approved of Giuliani's adultery, his pro-gay views, and his pro-abortion policies, but Giuliani was making New York a safe place to live one's life, which is what ultimately mattered.

So: If I were living in Holland, and I paid 50 percent of my income in taxes, welfare abuse was rampant, large parts of the cities were turning into "no-go" zones ruled by immigrant Islamic gangs, at a time when Muslim radicals worldwide were making war on the West — and it was unofficially forbidden to discuss this in public — you'd better believe I would vote for the only candidate who stood alone against these things. Wouldn't you? Like I said, Holland is getting Giulianized. Deal with it.