European Politicians Dept: Behind all this is Job Cohen, who as mayor of Amsterdam spent the past nine years pursuing a muscular approach to cultural integration – until March, when he quit to run for prime minister in Wednesday’s elections. He is currently, according to polls, by far the most popular prime ministerial candidate – though at the helm of a party that is unlikely to come in first – in an election that has become a microcosm of Europe’s culture wars, a national argument about dealing with the tensions that follow immigration, according to Globe And Mail. The most famous of those opponents is Geert Wilders, the shock-haired rabble-rouser who, as I noted here after interviewing him, applies to his country’s Muslims the ideas and rhetoric that an earlier generation of European politicians applied to Jews. Luckily, Dutch voters have tossed him to a distant fourth place, apparently after realizing the full scope of his monomaniacal ideas and second is its strictness. Complementing the city’s libertine demimonde of pot and hookers are very tough rules. Police here don’t mess about, and they are numerous. They are in the midst of a big campaign to evict all squatter enclaves. There is a truancy squad, probably the most rigorous in Europe, that rounds up immigrant teenagers on the street and marches them off to class. There is a mass-eviction program driving the worst of the brothels out of the Red Light district. Crime has fallen dramatically, with muggings down 17 per cent and vandalism 25 per cent last year, as a result of this tough approach. Wednesday’s vote will be the final chapter in a political odyssey that began on Nov. 2, 2004, when a young extremist of Moroccan parentage murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam and turned the Netherlands into the epicentre of Europe’s debate over Islam and immigration. It was the event that defined Job Cohen’s career, and created a new kind of politics that also defined his opponents. As
reported in the news.
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5.6.10
