Germany’s Pirate Party has been elected to several state assemblies. Are they heading for the national parliament? – By Lutz Lichtenberger
A specter is haunting German regional parliaments – the specter of the Pirate Party. The Pirates’ recent electoral successes have rattled the German political mainstream to such an extent that it seems not inappropriate to echo Karl Marx’ famous dictum in the first line of his 1848 manifesto about the ruling establishment’s fear of Communism.
In the 2009 parliamentary elections to the German Bundestag, the Pirates came from nowhere to take two percent of the vote nationally – not enough to get them elected, since German electoral law stipulates a five percent minimum to enter parliament, but sufficient to guarantee party financing from the state (their 850,000 votes secured €720,000) and more than enough to arouse the interest of the big parties.
The real bombshell followed in September 2011, when the Pirates garnered 8.9 percent of the vote in Berlin, taking their seats for the first time in a state parliament. In March this year, they built on this success in the southwestern state of Saarland where they polled 7.4 percent of the vote. Opinion polls indicate that the trend will continue in elections this May in Schleswig-Holstein and North-Rhine Westphalia.
But who are the Pirates and what do they want? According to their own lights, they are the party of the information society. The general public regards them simply as an Internet party.
The Pirates say they want transparency and direct democracy as well as the reform of current copyright laws. Concretely they demand free access to the Internet, a minimum basic income for citizens, and free public transportation. Beyond that, however, their direction is not yet clear. They are still deciding what course to set. Party chair Sebastian Nerz, a 28-year-old computer scientist specializing in bioinformatics, answers most questions about the Pirates’ beliefs with a standard sentence: “As a party we haven’t yet reached a policy decision on that issue.”
In reality, this undecidedness and image of occasionally clumsy amateurs is not only deliberate but is proving to be a source of strength. For many, the Pirate Party offers the promise of a new, unconventional kind of politics, a new form of participation, a new way to have your say.
Internal party policy-making processes take place on the Internet. Members can state their position and vote on each political issue. You could call it direct democracy 2.0 – the Pirates prefer the term “liquid democracy.” Constanze Kurz, spokesperson for the influential Chaos Computer Club, describes the attraction that has boosted party membership to 25,000. The Pirates, she says, offer the “lowest possible threshold for participation in the formulation of political solutions for people who don’t want to make politics the center of their lives.” The problem is, of course, that of the 25,000 party members, usually only a few hundred ever vote online on particular issues.
Apart from that, the Pirates share a deep aversion to the established party system, which is similar to the loathing felt by the American Tea Party for Washington insiders and career politicians. Not even a third of Pirate voters in Saarland explained their vote with reference to the party’s Internet policies; 85 percent claimed to be dissatisfied with all the other parties.
It’s still not clear whether the party owes its current success to its policies or to its (allegedly new) style of politics. It’s also equally unclear whether it will take its place among the array of protest parties that enjoy a short period of success – and then disappear again.
The German system of proportional representation guarantees a degree of influence to parties with electoral support of between 5 and 15 percent. New parties have frequently proved surprisingly successful in regional parliamentary elections. In 1993, the Statt-Partei (Instead Party), which sought to distance itself from other parties as an act of principle, polled 5.6 percent and became a junior coalition partner in the Hamburg state government. Subsequently, the party failed to win any parliamentary seats, securing only 0.4 percent at its last attempt in 2001 before disbanding. In the same year, however, another protest grouping – the Schill Party, named after its founder Ronald Schill, a Hamburg judge renowned for his hardline approach to sentencing – achieved 19.4 percent. In the Bundestag elections the following year, Schill secured only 0.8 percent of the vote.
Differences in political opinion aside, the factors that led to the demise of these and other small parties were inadequate structures and lack of organization as well as a tendency for personal disputes to spread quickly among their elected members – often over the issue of who is entitled to an official car. Another problem was their obvious appeal to political desperados, conspiracy theorists or plain old crackpots looking for their 15 minutes of fame.
In April, it became clear that the Pirate Party also has a few applicants for the role of political problem children. In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine, Martin Delius, floor leader for the Pirates in the Berlin parliament, compared the speed of the party’s electoral success with the Nazi Party’s swift rise to power between 1928 and 1933.
Delius is by no means considered to be sympathetic to the Nazi party. His remarks were chalked up to political inexperience. But other Pirates have also raised eyebrows with dubious remarks about Jews and the Holocaust, leaving the party in a dilemma as it tries to reconcile its belief in free speech and complete aversion to any kind of censorship with the need to distance itself from the extremist fringe.
Notwithstanding these recent quarrels, the Pirates remain that rare breed: a political party that is regarded, particularly by young male voters, as cool and hip. This despite their membership being dominated by system administrators, software developers and IT engineers – in short, geeks.