Popular politician ousted from leadership after anti-Muslim remarks

A growing right-wing party has sacked its charismatic leader for making slurs against Muslims.

Pim Fortuyn, a former academic and television talk show personality, was ousted at a meeting Sunday of the executive committee of Leefbaar Nederland when he refused to retract comments published in a newspaper interview Saturday.

Fortuyn said he would form his own list for the national election scheduled in May.

Fortuyn's Leefbaar Nederland grew from a local party into a national movement just two years ago. Recent polls suggest it could win anywhere from 10 to 22 seats in the 150-member parliament, enough to throw the usual coalition alliances into confusion.

Competing against 12 other candidates within the party, Fortuyn won 90 percent of the vote last November to become leader of Leefbaar Nederland, which roughly means "Livable Netherlands."

Although the Dutch have a long history of accepting refugees and of tolerance for other cultures, Fortuyn tapped into a vein of subsurface anger with his 1997 book "Against the Islamization of our Culture."

The Netherlands has about 800,000 Muslims, or 5 percent of the population, mostly originating from Turkey and Morocco.

On Saturday, the Volkskrant newspaper published an interview in which Fortuyn made some of his harshest anti-immigrant statements yet.

"I think 16 million Dutchmen are about enough. This is a full country," he was quoted as saying when asked how many refugees he would like to allow into the Netherlands.

If he were in power, he said, he would cut the number of immigrants and asylum seekers from 40,000 to 10,000 "in no time - the borders would be closed." He also would scrap the constitutional guarantee against discrimination.

Muslims "see us as an inferior sort of people," he was quoted as saying. "Moroccan boys never steal from Moroccans. Have you noticed that?" he said, calling Islam a "backward culture."