Leadership Quote by Pim Fortuyn

A permissive sentence that still keeps its finger hovering over the deportation button. Fortuyn’s line performs tolerance while quietly reaffirming that immigrants are a problem to be managed, not a normal part of the polity. “All those who are here can stay” sounds like reassurance, but it’s a conditional amnesty framed as personal discretion: he grants permission, which implies he could revoke it. The second clause - “I don’t say send them home like he does” - is political jujitsu. He positions himself as the humane alternative to a harsher rival, without abandoning the underlying premise that “sending them home” is on the table.

The intent is triangulation: siphon voters anxious about immigration and cultural change while maintaining plausible deniability against charges of extremism. Fortuyn’s genius, and his danger, was packaging hard-edged cultural nationalism as common sense modernity. He doesn’t need to name who “he” is; the pronoun invites the audience to fill in the villain, turning the line into a referendum on tone rather than policy architecture. Compassion becomes a branding strategy.

Context matters: early-2000s Netherlands, with growing unease about integration, Islam, and the perceived failures of multicultural policy, just before Fortuyn’s assassination supercharged these debates. The subtext is a promise of order: no mass expulsions, but an unmistakable pivot away from immigrant-friendly consensus. It’s an invitation to feel decent while voting for a crackdown.