Fortuyn party holds balance of power

Murdered right-wing leader Pim Fortuyn's party has won 26 seats

A dietician with a taste for fast cars, a journalist, a couple of surgeons, a medical student, a businessman and a former Miss Holland: these were the stars of Pim Fortuyn's List.

Under the proportional representation system in Holland, 26 of the men and women on Mr Fortuyn's list of candidate's will become Members of Parliament, all of them for the first time.

After yesterday's election, the conservative Christian Democrats are the largest party with 43 seats - but their efforts to form a government will be fiendishly difficult.

No two parties have managed enough seats between them to achieve an overall majority. The three parties in the defeated left-wing coalition scored 54 out of 150.

There are 11 Greens, and 16 from other smaller groups. So in order to govern comfortably, Pim Fortuyn's List (PFL) is the obvious place for the Christian Democrats to look for coalition partners - and the negotiations should be interesting, not least because the Christian Democrat leader has already ruled out adopting the newcomers' main demand: the strict enforcement of immigration rules.

So the drama of Pim Fortuyn's sudden arrival - and horrific exit from Dutch politics have made it more acceptable for politicians to directly link immigration issues to rising crime.

Has it also meant that the immigration policy of the largest party, the Christian Democrats will shift to accommodate the manifesto of the LPF? We asked Bram van Paper, who was Mayor of Rotterdam for fifteen years and a former Interior Minister in Holland's Labour government.

Where's the Left?

After Gerhart Schroeder ended Helmut Kohl's long reign in Germany, in 1998, Tony Blair declared: "It is a tremendous thing that we will now see centre-left government in Britain, France, and Germany.

The five years since then have proved that Mr Blair's sense of a historical shift was misplaced - or at best premature. The socialists in France were humiliated by Jean-Marie Le Pen: social democrat governments in Denmark and now Holland have been thrown out: Sylvio Berlusconi's right-wing coalition swept to power in Italy last year: and Gerhard Scroeder in Germany could easily lose out to the conservatives in elections this September.

What went wrong with Mr Blair's vision? We spoke to the Labour MP David Miliband, who helped to establish the new Convention on the Future of Europe.

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