Peter Langendam (72) has watched the first episode of The year of Pim Fortuyn, the five-part series that director Michiel van Jaarsveld made for AvroTros. Nuclear physicist Langendam played a prominent role in that year – which, incidentally, lasted only a little more than five months, from November 25, 2001, when Fortuyn became the leader of the party Liveable Netherlands, to May 6, 2002, when he was murdered at the Media Park by Volkert. Van der Graaf.
When Fortuyn at the beginning of February 2002, after a controversial interview in de Volkskrant had to leave Leefbaar Nederland, it was he who convinced Fortuyn that he should continue. Fortuyn had serious doubts, but if Langendam finds something, he can be compelling. “I said: you want it, you can do it and you have to.” The Pim Fortuyn List (LPF) was launched on 14 February, chaired by Peter Langendam.
The rest is history, the three months that followed are the most dramatic period in Dutch political history of the past half century. The LPF grew rapidly, until the Intomart bureau polled the party on May 6, the day of the assassination, for 38 seats – making it the largest and Pim Fortuyn candidate for prime minister.
The strategy, co-devised by Langendam, worked: former PvdA member Fortuyn focused all his attacks on the PvdA. Until then, that was the largest party that had just elected a new party leader. Ad Melkert had succeeded incumbent Prime Minister Wim Kok and was preparing for the premiership. Until Fortuyn threw a spanner in the works.
Twenty years later, that is the theme of The year of Fortuynthe battle between Ad Melkert and Pim Fortuyn, played phenomenally by Ramsey Nasr and Jeroen Spitzenberger respectively.
In between, Frank Lammers moves as Peter Langendam. Now Langendam is a great admirer of the actor Lammers. He even likes him in the Jumbo commercials. But this time he looked at him with crooked toes. ‘I am portrayed as an aso, as a tokkie. Like an outright prolet who slurps oysters.’
And that, Peter Langendam just wanted to say, is not in accordance with reality. ‘I was brought up in a very civilized family in a very neat academic family. My two brothers are doctors, I have been married for fifty years and have seven wonderful grandchildren. I’ve founded eight companies, including chip maker and developer ItoM, of which my son is now CEO.’
Sure, he can be sharp, sometimes too sharp, “but I never get raunchy.” Too bad, he would have liked to have had a word with Lammers. Incidentally, Ramsey Nasr did not want to talk to Ad Melkert, because he was afraid that he would like Melkert and would no longer be able to play him freely. Lammers had also run that risk.
In the latest episode of The year of Pim Fortuyn Langendam is very present. When he hears that Pim has been murdered, he is broken on the floor in the Cube, the headquarters of the LPF and is overcome with a huge sense of guilt: ‘I killed him.’
‘That’s right, although I wasn’t sitting on the floor. But I had convinced him that he should continue with his own party. I regretted that, had I not done so, Pim would still have been alive. But yeah, that’s nonsense of course. Things are going as they go.’
When the LPF members visit Prime Minister Kok in the Catshuis the day after the murder, Langendam makes a great fuss. ‘I was angry yes. We had just been to Pim’s body, I was emotional. “Outrageous, the bullet came from the left,” I said. Says Klaas de Vries, who was also there: “I’m left, you insult me.”
The last episode also contains a kind of dream scene in which Melkert talks to Fortuyn in a calm tone and both men show understanding for each other. Was that realistic? Langendam: ‘Of course! Pim could be glued with a wet finger. If Melkert hadn’t been so defensive and had come to our party office for a cup of coffee, he would have been received like royalty!’
He now makes bronze statues, under the name ‘Pirie’. And he just wrote a book, Physics is everywhere† ‘You have to do something when you’re retired.’
He still regularly thinks about that crazy six months. ‘It has been twenty years already. You don’t think that’s possible, do you? I have a fourteen-year-old grandson who has never heard of Pim Fortuyn. I’m getting to be an old man.’