Populism: polder and prairie: The rapid rise and fall of Pim Fortuyn

DUTCH POLITICS HAS A REPUTATION FOR DULLNESS AND STABILITY. But that was hardly the case in 2002, when Pim Fortuyn entered politics. His party came in second in that year's election, although it had not yet been formally founded and Fortuyn himself had been murdered a few days earlier. Yet it now remains to be seen if the party can survive the assassination of its founding father. The election for the European Parliament, to be held in June 2004, may be the final test. Canada is quite different from the Netherlands. A thinly populated geographical giant, a former colony and a rather decentralized federal state, Canada has ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity without much ideological variety, and a majoritarian political system dominated (at least until 1993) by two pragmatic "catch-all" parties. The Netherlands, once a colonial empire but now a densely populated and very small, highly centralized state, is ethnically fairly homogeneous but fragmented along ideological and religious lines, and hence used to proportional representation, ideological mass parties and consociational politics. Yet in recent decades, new parties emerged in both Canada and the Netherlands that shared a remarkable number of features: an ideological mixture of economic neoliberalism, cultural conservatism and democratic populism, along with personal leadership and a more confrontational political style. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that Canada's populist party grew up on the prairies: flat land, divided into rectangular plots, in many ways similar to the Dutch polders