Pirate Party--started in Sweden, now big in Germany

[Jenne]

(as usual, apologies if this has been talked about already)

On Fareed Zakaria's GPS this morning, he highlighted the Pirate Party that's won almost 10% of the vote in Berlin's Parliament.  Which means it's got a significant majority over Merkel's party as well.

Veddy veddy eenteresting...especially given what its main interests are:  legislative freedom on the internet, transparency in government, open access filesharing, an increased voice in government, free public transportation, nuclear-free power...etc. 

There was a Pirate Party International party formed in the '09 European Parliament elections which won them a seat on the EU-wide body--this is amazing to me, and bears watching.

some links:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/09/20/39930.htm
http://bigthink.com/ideas/40272
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/09/19/uk-germany-elections-idUKTRE78I3RV20110919

[Triple Zero]

I mentioned it passingly in another thread where it was OT anyway, so I'll repeat here:

Speaking of (somewhat) local news, the German Pirate Party got 15 seats in the recent Berlin elections. FUCK YEAH. Both the German and the Swedish are the most awesome Pirate Parties IMO (the Dutch one is a bunch of camera-shy nerds that think it's a good idea to post about boobies on their blog). This is more than even they expected, because they put no more than 15 people on their list   [meaning that if they had gotten even more votes, they'd have to give up a seat, because you can't just put someone there that wasn't on the list, because nobody could have voted for them, makes sense]

IOW, what you said

[Verbal Mike]

Yup, very awesome. I happened to be in Berlin for the weekend before the elections, and their low-budget campaign was very noticeable and very imaginative. (They posted the campaign budget sizes for them and one of the big parties, and the gap was enormous. I think PP spent something in the ballpark of 50K€ and the big party several 100K€ or something.)
They've posted a pic on FB (should be the latest post here if you go in quick: https://www.facebook.com/PiratenparteiDeutschland?sk=wall&filter=2) showing the results of a poll to be featured in Der Spiegel tomorrow. On the question "who would you vote for in federal elections if they were to take place next Sunday", 5% said they'd vote for the Pirates. This is a significant number, because to get into parliament in Germany you need...5%.
If they can pull off another Berlin on the federal level (in 2013 iirc) they will be a force to reckon with. Of course, it is yet to be seen what they actually do with a significant presence in parliament... Berlin politics will be something to watch in the coming two years, I'd say.

Another interesting detail of the Berlin results and the Spiegel poll is that the pro-business junior coalition member FDP is under 5% in both. Not surprising, since they've been immensely unpopular for a while now (for one, they fielded minister Guttenberg, who had to resign earlier this year when it turned out most of his doctoral thesis was plagiarized -- based on crowdsourced research, btw) but it's nice to see them being rendered actually irrelevant in elections.

[Jenne]

Thanks, Guys!    Glad I'm not the only one who noted this as an "interesting development." 

[Verbal Mike]

Hah! Someone tweeted that Christian Democrat Sigfried Kauder wants to get the Pirate Party 15% in the federal elections, linking to this:
http://www.gulli.com/news/17201-bundestag-vorsitzender-des-rechtsausschusses-will-gesetzentwurf-fuer-2-strikes-2011-09-26
It's a report that he'll be proposing a bill this year instituting a two-strike system for copyright infringement (that is, if you do it twice you're banned from the Internets). The Pirate Party became noticeable just before the 2009 federal and EU elections mainly due to Ursula von der Leyen, a minister from the same party (CDU, the senior coalition member), pushing for a law that would have the federal police agency managing a secret blacklist of websites, supposedly only for child pornography, with sites on the blacklist being blocked using a "this website is blocked" page. I think the law passed but the new government quickly concluded it was stupid, ineffective, and impractical, so it ended up not coming into any real effect (iirc). But it served as a focal point for PP campaigning on Twitter and made their membership jump a few hundred percent. If it had happened a year sooner they might have gotten into federal parliament... And now they have the government pushing "two strikes", a major victory in the capital's state parliament, and two years to go until federal elections...
LET THE LULZ ENSUE.

[Cain]

Looks like the prediction of British futurists is true:  access to the internet will become a major political issue, with denied or massively low-par access possibly being cause for civil unrest.

[Triple Zero]

Looks like the prediction of British futurists is true:  access to the internet will become a major political issue, with denied or massively low-par access possibly being cause for civil unrest.

Makes sense. I mean, they never had a reason to "ban" people from TV, but if they had, I bet you'd have seen a very similar reaction.

Internet being both entertainment, public publication as well as a communication medium, I expect the general population feels a greater sense of "ownership" and even greater entitlement, than with TV.

[Cain]

The UN recently declared access to television as an important right, actually.

If not for the practices of China, they'd likely say the same about access to an uncensored internet.

[Verbal Mike]

The latest (in English!): http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20110928-37883.html
tl;dr: PP polling at 7% nationally; many voters choosing them in protest of the establishment.

[Jenne]

The latest (in English!): http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20110928-37883.html
tl;dr: PP polling at 7% nationally; many voters choosing them in protest of the establishment.

I like their platform as far as it goes, you know they have US counterparts...which I've never heard of.  I need to read up on what the US-side Pirate Party People are all about.  If they're just another faction dressed up different but act like Tea Baggers, they can go fuck themselves.

[Verbal Mike]

http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20111009-38093.html [English]
Now polling at 9% nationally. And this, I remind you, is without a national campaign.