The Dutch politician who caused the political downfall of lawmaker Ayaan Hirsi Ali lost her bid for leadership of the Netherlands' free-market VVD party on Wednesday, the party said.
Hardline Immigration Minister Rita Verdonk lost to the more moderate Mark Rutte in a contest seen in part as a referendum on the country's immigration policies in a party primary before national elections due next year.
Rutte, who received 51 percent of the vote, will now stand in national elections next May, with an outside chance of becoming prime minister as leader of the country's third-largest party.
Verdonk, a former deputy prison warden, built her reputation as a strict enforcer of the country's immigration policies, among the toughest in Europe.
Since taking office in 2003, Verdonk has ordered citizenship classes and tests for immigrants, raised visa fees by hundreds of dollars and began imprisoning rejected asylum-seekers before deporting them. As a result, immigration is half what it was in 2000.
She was the front-runner in the contest with Rutte until she set off a political firestorm earlier last month by threatening to revoke the passport of Somali-born lawmaker Hirsi Ali, the country's best-known critic of fundamentalist Islam.
Hirsi Ali -- also a member of the VVD -- quit after Verdonk said her naturalization was invalid because she gave a false name when she moved to the Netherlands in 1992.
Hirsi Ali, 36, acknowledged her real name was Ayaan Hirsi Magan, and that she had fabricated her name because she feared reprisals from her family after fleeing an arranged marriage.
Verdonk, 50, had benefited in the polls from similar decisions in the past, including denying citizenship to an Ivory Coast-born soccer player, Salomon Kalou, and deporting a young refugee from Kosovo just a month before she was due to graduate from Dutch high school.
But after Hirsi Ali's resignation, Verdonk was skewered in a 10-hour emergency debate in parliament, in which she was criticized by all sides for acting too hastily.
Verdonk was forced to review Hirsi Ali's case, and agree to reprocess her naturalization under her true name if necessary.
Many prominent members of the VVD, including EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes, shifted their support from Verdonk to Rutte after the Hirsi Ali affair.
The VVD said on Wednesday that 51 percent of votes went to Rutte, while 46 percent went to Verdonk.
Rutte, 39, is best known for having held two low-profile Cabinet positions in the current government: deputy minister of social affairs and deputy minister of education.
"Mark, congratulations, you deserve it," Verdonk said in a televised concession speech. "I'll stand right behind you" in national elections due in May next year.
Rutte vowed to "increase prosperity and to allow optimism to return" to the Netherlands.
Hirsi Ali became internationally known when Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in November 2004 by a Muslim radical incensed by the film Submission, a critique of the treatment of women under Islam for which she wrote the script.
She is now under police protection because of threats to her life from radicals -- unable to speak in public while her immigration case is under review -- and planning a move to the US to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende conceded on Wednesday that her resignation had damaged the Netherlands' reputation as a haven of tolerance.
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