AMSTERDAM -- The Anti-Immigration Party of murdered Dutch populist Pim Fortuyn will take charge of immigration in a new center-right government after clinching four cabinet seats in coalition talks.

Conservatives, liberals and Fortuyn's five-month-old party agreed the division of 14 cabinet posts on Thursday, two months after voters ditched Prime Minister Wim Kok's center-left government, an official statement said.

Pim Fortuyn List (LPF), the free-market VVD and the Christian Democrats (CDA) say the government will be tough on crime and illegal immigration.

After weeks of horse-trading, CDA leader Peter Balkenende is set to become prime minister with his party filling six cabinet seats, including justice and foreign affairs.

Its junior partners secured four cabinet posts each, with the VVD securing the finance ministry.

Fortuyn, a gay former sociology lecturer with a shaven head, was gunned down outside a radio station days before the May election. An animal-rights activist was charged with his murder.

The LPF gasped at its unexpected success in the election, storming to second place behind the Christian Democrats.

The populist party has had to drop Fortuyn's call for no immigration after opposition from its new coalition partners.

Fortuyn stirred controversy by saying the Netherlands was Full.

"This whole (immigration) process will now be our responsibility. From the moment that an asylum seeker comes to our country until he is integrated... That's what Pim Fortuyn always wanted," his successor as LPF leader, Mat Herben, told the Dutch news agency ANP.

Immigration has been a key topic in recent elections across Europe with far-right parties also making gains in France, Belgium and Denmark, which like the Netherlands had a reputation as one of the continent's most liberal havens.

---------- Restrictions --------- The embryonic coalition plans to penalize immigrants who fail to pass Dutch language and citizenship classes and place restrictions on newcomers bringing in relatives from abroad.

Around 10 percent of the population of 16 million in the small but prosperous Netherlands are non-Western immigrants.

The new government also plans to clamp down on businesses employing illegal immigrants. The Netherlands has one of the lowest unemployment rates in Europe at around two percent with acute labor shortages in education, health care and shops.

There are an estimated 46,000 to 110,000 illegal immigrants.

Around 32,500 people asked for asylum last year, with the largest number coming from Angola, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone.

The CDA, a linchpin of governments for most of the 20th century, will control justice, foreign affairs and agriculture.

Fortuyn's party will also run economics, health and sport.

The interior, finance, housing and defense ministries go to the VVD.

The government-in-waiting still has to agree on candidates to fill the posts.

The CDA won 40 seats in the 150-seat Parliament, and the LPF 26. The coalition parties enjoy a comfortable parliamentary majority with more than 90 seats.

Coalition plans include cutting national debt and hospital waiting lists, slimming the civil service and tightening social welfare spending, aiming to save over six billion euros by 2006.

It pledges to put more police on the streets, make carrying identity papers mandatory and to step up the fight against the drugs trade, but there are no plans to challenge the liberal policy of licensing the sale of cannabis in so-called "coffee shops".