Ad Melkert should have reached out to his opponent Pim Fortuyn twenty years ago, according to the then PvdA leader himself. Although he is sure that Fortuyn hadn’t seized it. “It was in his interest to oppose the PvdA.” Still, Melkert should have tried to talk to him more. “Giving a helping hand, bridging the gap, perhaps handing in something of your own opinion in order to maintain that broader support.”
That’s what Ad Melkert said on Saturday at the History Festival of the Historical Newspaper in Haarlem, where he was interviewed by Coen Verbraak.
Since the murder of Pim Fortuyn on May 6, 2002, Melkert rarely looked back on the turbulent period before the 2002 parliamentary elections in which Fortuyn became increasingly popular as a politician. Melkert did so in an extensive conversation with Verbraak.
Famous television debate
Melkert believes that the media played an important role in Fortuyn’s popularity. With Liveable Rotterdam, Fortuyn became the largest party in Rotterdam in the municipal elections in March 2002. The television debate that evening between national party leaders became famous, partly because Melkert reacted with visible reluctance to Fortuyn.
Melkert told Verbraak that Fortuyn should not have been sitting there. “In advance we had argued with the NOS about Fortuyn’s invitation. It was customary for national party leaders of parliamentary parties to hold that debate.” Now “suddenly a party leader came in who had achieved a very remarkable result in one city and who was allowed to take a seat there without even being a national party and who was allowed to claim victory there.” That was “media manipulation”, according to Melkert.
He would have liked to do the debate differently himself, said Melkert at the History Festival when asked about his grumpy attitude that evening. “As a politician you have to win people over. If that doesn’t work, you haven’t done it right.”
The fact that he initially did not congratulate Fortuyn on his victory was because he came in late. “It was very wrong of Paul Witteman (debate leader, ed.) to say to me, as it were, like a school teacher: wouldn’t you congratulate him? Can I decide for myself when I do that?”
Election campaign PvdA
Melkert acknowledged that the PvdA’s message in the 2002 election campaign did not really catch on: that employment and incomes had increased during the Kok cabinets and that the PvdA was a reliable government partner. The campaign was much more about the unrest in society after the September 11 attacks, about migration and the multicultural society. The PvdA did not have a good answer to that.
“We wanted to build a multicultural society. We didn’t want to go along with the idea of getting tougher about asylum seekers. But what we couldn’t control was that all the media Fortuyn suddenly became their darling stated. That was disproportionate.”
The murder of Fortuyn was a traumatic experience. “I felt myself getting ice cold.”
The emotion he felt then still comes back when he drives past the media park in Hilversum where Fortuyn was murdered. “I will never lose that image, a tall man lying there on that concrete. A person with whom you sat at the table the day before, who you shook hands with and who ended up doing the same thing as us, no matter what you thought of him.”
It took a very long time, said Melkert, before “he was approached somewhat normal again in the Netherlands”. He left national politics after the elections to the House of Representatives on 15 May when the PvdA lost 22 seats.
Melkert was threatened after the murder of Fortuyn. He got a job as administrator at the World Bank in Washington. He later became envoy of the United Nations in Iraq, where he survived an attack. In the years that followed, he registered with a speakers’ bureau where people are hired for conferences and lectures. “There was once an invitation. Apparently it was not done Melkert on your invitation for an evening.”
Now that Melkert is chairman of the trade association of hospitals (NVZ), he feels a bit rehabilitated again. “I considered that rehabilitation was very unjust.”