Davos Newbies

Fortuyn’s politics

Dave Winer has run Adam Curry’s Big Lie, a passionate response to the Fortuyn assassination.

Step away from the horror of the killing and look at Fortuyn’s declared policies: halt immigration, integrate existing immigrants, re-erect Dutch border controls, sack 25% of civil servants, reduce Dutch payments to the EU, end the system of consensus politics. This is idiosyncratic, reactionary politics. And however he dressed up his immigration policy, it appealed in part to some of the worst sentiments in the populace.

Not too worried

Two useful tonics to Euro-gloom today: Martin Woollacott in The Guardian and The Economist’s lead editorial.

Woollacott: “The difficulties of the moment are always special, but difficulties of national purpose are recurrent. The record shows them, together with solutions, inspired or otherwise, recoveries and new starts. It also shows one or two moments, when they did indeed presage terrible things. But there is nothing to suggest that the stumbling and fumbling evident now means that a political catastrophe for Europe is on the horizon.”

The Economist: “Europe has, indeed, had a shameful few weeks. It has problems galore. The frustration expressed against complacent and arrogant elites by the French who voted for Mr Le Pen or by the Dutch who may yet vote for Mr Fortuyn’s party is salutary. But Europe is far from irredeemable.”