the party's MPs was a young woman of Turkish descent. His ideology comprised the following positions: Civil liberties Classical liberalism Criticism of Islam Deregulation Direct democracy Euroscepticism Freedom of speech Laissez-faire LGBT rights Republicanism Secularism Separation of church and state Small government Women's rights Criticism Fortuyn was compared with the politicians Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the foreign press. These comparisons were often referred to by Dutch reporters and politicians. An explicit comparison with Le Pen was made by Ad Melkert, then lijsttrekker of the Labour Party, who said in Emmen on 24 April 2002: "If you flirt with Fortuyn, then in the Netherlands the same thing will happen as happened in France. There they woke up with Le Pen, soon we will wake up with Fortuyn." On 5 May, the day before the assassination, Fortuyn in a debate with Melkert organized by the Algemeen Dagblad newspaper claimed that he was demonized. In it he said that he often had to tell journalists that the image created of him in the media was incorrect. Columnist Jan Blokker wrote that "[a]fter reading [...] I realized once again that Professor Pim may really be called the Jean-Marie Le Pen, the Filip Dewinter, the Jörg Haider and the new Hans Janmaat of the Netherlands." Prime Minister Wim Kok accused Fortuyn of stirring up fear and stimulating xenophobia among the Dutch people. In the run-up to the 2002 election, GroenLinks leader Paul Rosenmöller claimed Fortuyn's policies were "not just right but extreme right". Fortuyn often responded to criticism by stating that his views were misunderstood or distorted by the media, and in turn rejected comparisons and expressed his personal distaste for radical far-right politicians in other European countries. He explicitly distanced himself from Jean-Marie Le Pen and criticised some of his policies, including Le Pen's downplaying of the Holocaust. In domestic politics, Fortuyn also distanced his views from hard-right Dutch politicians such as Hans Janmaat and Joop Glimmerveen (who called for the mass expulsion of foreigners from the Netherlands) by maintaining that if he came to power, he would pardon existing illegal immigrants if they had lived in the Netherlands for over five years and offer them a path to citizenship if they could be assimilated into society. In an interview on the Dutch talk show Jensen! that was broadcast shortly before his death, Fortuyn accused members of the Dutch government and