Fortuyn favoured depraved

His controversial views on race, immigration, liberalisation of drug laws and his open homosexuality were well-known. But his approval of paedophilia, while not a secret, was ignored by Dutch journalists covering his election campaign.

Fortuyn stood to gain up to 20% of the vote in Wednesday's election and his list is expected to gain thousands of extra votes.

Ireen Van Engelen, an anti-paedophile campaigner in Holland, said: "I have been writing to journalists around the country for months as Fortuyn's popularity grew. I was asking them to challenge him on his views about paedophilia. But none of them dared. I also wrote to ministers, but none of them were interested. It's a disgrace.

"It is strange that they could criticise him, quite rightly, for being racist, but were unwilling to raise this other matter. I can't say for sure that he was a paedophile himself, but he was certainly an advocate for adult-child sex."

Van Engelen cites a column Fortuyn wrote for the Dutch current affairs magazine, Elsevier, in 1999. It was so on-message for pro-paedophile campaigners that it was reproduced by Koinos, a magazine for homosexual paedophiles.

In his article, Fortuyn wrote: "Paedophilia is just like hetero and homosexuality. It is something that is in the genes. There is little if anything that you can do about it or against it. You are who you are… sooner or later the proclivity makes its irresistible appearance. It is not any more curable than hetero or homosexuality."

The column concludes: "The law philosopher and paedophile [Edward] Brongersma, for years senator of the Labour party, spent his life campaigning for understanding of the paedophile fellow man. He launched this effort fearlessly after serving a sentence for sexual harassment of a minor. The minor in question had not considered it harassment, but the justice department judged otherwise in the 1950s.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, Brongersma slowly but surely gained ground. After the invention of the Pill came sexual liberation. Gay sex became accepted, and why then should paedo sex not be allowed – under the strict condition that the child is willing and that there is no coercion? This enlightened point of view has meanwhile been abandoned, and under the influence of the ologists, the child is defined as totally

devoid of sexual desires, at least where adults are concerned.

"We are far removed from the understanding that Brongersma tried to foster, to our own detriment, for that matter. For everything which can be discussed is in principle also manageable, one would think!"

In the last week, Fortuyn has been lionised in the Dutch media. Thousands of mourners have paid their respects and many more have promised to vote for the list of candidates that still bears his name. In their sense of shock many in Holland have lost sight of Fortuyn's controversial ideas and instead focused on his image as a colourful and entertaining maverick.

"The killing has produced a sort of Dutch 'Diana' effect," said Fred Spier, a social anthropologist at Amsterdam University. "Tens of thousands of people who previously had no sympathy for Mr Fortuyn have joined his supporters all across the country in a mass outpouring of grief. He has turned from the bad man of right-wing politics into a fallen national hero overnight.''

Not only has Fortuyn's death won the sympathy of voters, but it has also served to discredit the mainstream parties, which are being accused of having whipped up a national hate campaign against Fortuyn by 'wrongly' portraying him as a right-wing extremist.

In 1998, Fortuyn published an autobiographical work called Babyboomers, the name given to children born in the post-war years up to 1953. He reveals that he had early sexual experiences with adult males, which he claims to have found pleasurable and exciting. His logic is that because he enjoyed sexual experiences with adult men as a child, it should be legal.

Fortuyn's first experience occurred when he was five years old. "The Dutch soldier asks if I want to see his tent. That's what I want. I like it and they all are sleeping on the ground in a sleeping-bag. I ask if it is hard and cold to sleep on the ground. Oh no, come here. Together we crawl in his sleeping-bag. The soldier asks my name and I ask his name.

“He is called Arie and he asks if I like that name. Yes, I think that's a nice name and I lie beside him, nice and warm."

Fortuyn then described a close sexual encounter with the soldier before leaving his sleeping-bag "to go and play outside." He added: "Can I come back tomorrow? Yes, tomorrow I may come back, says Arie."

A few pages later, he describes another incident: "I went to the park for a walk, it was very silent and the sun was shining. On the bench sat a young fellow. I stood still, curious."

Fortuyn relates another sexual encounter - this time in explicit detail. He concludes: "I was frightened and ran away to my home, to my mother. Excited, I ran into the room. My mother looked at me searchingly and asked what had happened. Nothing, of course. Watch out, little man, was the only thing she said. A glass of lemonade made me calm down. Yes, that was exciting."

Most telling is his appraisal of these memories. "In chapter 1 about the 1950s, I wrote about my early sexual experiences, experiences that I see as an enrichment. Today, an experience like that in the ppark could easily lead to a complaint by parents to the police because of paedophilia, and the relevant young man would be in trouble. But why?

"He didn't do me any harm. On the contrary, he showed me something that was incomprehensibly exciting and I could feel and touch it, but today we are ready to interfere with complete teams of professionals. By interfering in such an irritating and grown-up way in the world of children, we make an

enormous problem of something that for a child is no problem at all and is only exciting."

Van Engelen said: "The problem with Pim Fortuyn was that he never grew up. In his mind he stayed a little boy. A lot of Dutch men recognised that. That's what made him so popular, among other things. It's a pity that we no longer have the opportunity to challenge him about these views. He did not seem willing to recognise that a child will be harmed by sex with an adult."