Dutch parliament in shock after right-winger gunned down

Dutch political leaders were today considering delaying the May 15 general elections following the assassination of far-right political leader Pim Fortuyn, whose party was set to win up to 28 of the 150 parliamentary seats.

Fortuyn was shot dead yesterday in the car park of a radio station in Hilversum, 12 miles from Amsterdam, where he had just given a campaign interview. Political parties immediately suspended all campaigning.

Police said they had arrested a 33-year-old man shortly after the killing.

Prime Minister Wim Kok and senior Cabinet officials were meeting Fortuyn’s party leaders today to find out if they wanted next Wednesday’s elections to be delayed.

Yesterday vice-prime minister Annemie Jorritsma said that holding the elections after an assassination was ‘‘bizarre’’. Els Borst, another vice-premier, said ‘‘maybe a time-out is necessary’’.

However, on Dutch radio and television, members of Fortuyn’s party, Pim Fortuyn’s List, suggested the vote go ahead as planned.

A former academic and columnist, Fortuyn was shot from close range in the head, neck and chest by a lone assailant.

Police said their suspect was a white man and a Dutch citizen. They had no immediate motive.

In a densely populated nation of 16 million that prides itself in tolerance and no-ripple consensus politics, Fortuyn had set the political stage aflame.

Openly gay and an impeccable dresser, he held strong anti-immigration views that found a resonance in the street but upset no-friction Dutch politics.

Harry de Heyer, a 22-year-old truck driver and Fortuyn supporter, said that in the current Dutch political climate, ‘‘if you complain (about immigrants) you are immediately called racist and then you get shot’’.

Unlike far-right leaders elsewhere in Europe, Fortuyn did not advocate sending immigrants home but only advocated stemming the influx. ‘‘Holland is full,’’ he would say.

Fortuyn gained popularity with verbal attacks on the Netherlands’ growing Muslim population - he called Islam ‘‘backward’’ - and strident criticism of Kok, a social democrat, and his liberal and conservative coalition partners.

His views were out of character in a liberal country that was the first to legalize gay marriages, regulate prostitution, approve and control euthanasia and tolerate over-the-counter sale of marijuana.

But his outspokenness seemed to expose underlying public suspicion of immigrants who are often blamed for rising crime and drug abuse.

His death sent shockwaves through the Netherlands, where most political leaders, except for the prime minister, go without bodyguards into crowds and on to public transportation.

In recent months, Fortuyn had received death threats but did not ask for police protection.

‘‘Pim Fortuyn is gone,’’ a devastated Kok said Monday. ‘‘Respect for each other means you fight with words, not bullets. What has happened here is indescribable.’’

Kok appealed for calm, but several hundred protesters, many of them Fortuyn supporters, fought with riot police around the historic parliament complex in the centre of The Hague last night. At least two cars were set alight in an underground garage.

Fortuyn stormed on to the political stage in March when his party swept 35% of the vote in local elections in Rotterdam, a port city with a large immigrant population.

In the wake of Fortuyn’s success, other parties pledged to re-examine the generous refugee policy of the Netherlands, where about one person in eight comes from a non-Dutch background, nearly half of those from Islamic countries.