Last autumn, ahead of a local election, Berliners were amused by a small raft navigating its way through the capital’s canals. The boat sailed under a black and orange banner. Its crew was young men in shirts and hoodies, listening to electronic music and swigging Club Mate (a strong caffeine drink favoured by computer geeks). They were handing out leaflets for a political group few Germans had ever heard of: the Pirate Party. Named after the online file-sharing platform “The Pirate Bay,” and taking its inspiration from the original Pirate movement in Sweden, the party’s central policies seemed to be the denunciation of internet censorship and the call for free online file sharing. Yet in Berlin’s election in September, the Pirates captured 8.9 per cent of the vote and 15 seats in the regional legislature. Nine months later, the Pirates have won 45 seats in four German regional parliaments. They poll at 9-12 per cent nationwide, and have more than doubled their membership in the last eight months—30,000 people now sail under the Pirates’ flag.
While the established parties are still rubbing their eyes, commentators have scrambled to understand this unexpected addition to Germany’s rather predictable political landscape. Initial sketches cast the Pirates as an ephemeral, specialised and local anti-establishment group: young urban internet “natives.” But the party’s evolution shows that it is no longer a single-issue faction, nor solely a home for protest-voters. It is now a gateway into political participation for citizens turned off by what they see as the complacent and incestuous elite of the political establishment.
The Pirates are the first ever western party to treat the internet not just as a means of communication but as a genuine sphere of political interaction. The party captures the Lebensgefühl, the sense of generational identity that distinguishes the digital natives from earlier internet tourists and irregulars. But its surprisingly broad appeal now goes beyond that. The politicians who have been falling over themselves to open Twitter accounts, to host “Facebook parties” (like Horst Seehofer, the 62-year-old head of the Bavarian conservative party) and to discuss their parties’ internet policies don’t understand that the Pirates’ success is rooted less in their policies than in the way they do politics.
The way they do it is personal. They make decisions through web contact, enabling participation on a scale that no party convention can match. A Pirate Wiki, which, like Wikipedia, can be constantly edited, holds all the information necessary for novice Pirates—from how to found your own local Pirate crew (yes, they actually call them “crews”) to printing campaign flyers. Through online forums and software for so-called “Liquid Feedback,” anyone can join the debate or propose ideas. Anyone can throw their hat into the ring to be party leader. Strong personalities—a prerequisite for careers in other parties—are frowned upon within the Pirate Party, which elects a new executive committee every year.
The weaknesses of this are obvious. Participation requires computer literacy. Voting remains largely anonymous and therefore unaccountable. There are few women, and the Pirates still lack clear views (much less policies) on big issues—such as the euro crisis—a deficiency regularly noted by competitors and the media. Sebastian Nerz, former Pirates leader, said earlier this year that his party preferred to admit that it does not have a clear solution to Europe’s woes rather than coming up with a new view every three months. This honesty makes the Pirates attractive to voters who say they suffer from “politician fatigue” rather than “politics fatigue,” but it also means that voting for them is a gamble: you don’t know where they’re eventually going to stand.
Recently, the Pirates were forced to depart from their “anything goes” tolerance when some members expressed extremist views, including denial of the Holocaust, the supreme taboo of German mainstream politics. A party convention unanimously condemned those views, but only after media scrutiny had exposed the party leadership as worryingly naïve. Half a dozen leading Pirates have resigned within the last two months, exhausted by the painful process of trying to manage growth and professionalise the party at the same time. Commentators have found it easy to dismiss them as lightweights, a gibe which gains some weight from superficial encounters with the core membership.
Many are proud computer nerds, and science fiction is a favourite obsession. In one party office, posters for movies like The Matrix and Terminator 2 adorn the walls, while the Economist reported that in the May regional elections, the party decided to field 42 candidates in homage to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (in which a computer is asked “what is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?” and gives the answer “42”). At a party conference earlier this year, some members dressed in full pirate regalia, while others amused themselves playing in a fairground-style children’s pool filled with plastic balls.
And yet the Pirates’ base continues to broaden. In elections, they draw votes from across the political spectrum. Their membership now includes teachers, lawyers, doctors, housewives; their internal debate has broadened to encompass social policies, economics and questions of sustainability.
While the euro crisis has seen a rise of populist right-wing parties in other European countries, Germany’s Pirates have offered a moderate outlet for those dissatisfied with the status quo. Their “Liquid Feedback” method of debate—an online forum that takes in all policy suggestions from party activists—provides a way for individuals to express more unorthodox views without allowing radicals to determine the party’s final position. Any proposition has to gather a certain ammount of support before it is taken up for general discussion and put to the vote. The procedure has already stopped initiatives calling for Germany’s departure from the eurozone or the immediate removal of all German forces from Afghanistan. At the same time, it allows for opposing views to be aired without causing resentment.
Germany’s established parties have not yet found a convincing way to engage with the Pirates, congratulating and ridiculing them in turn, and trying to emulate their internet success. Both the centre-right Christian Democrats and the centre-left Social Democrats have set up think tanks to create a political strategy for the internet. Oddly, though, both have been named after outdated technological equipment. D64, the Social Democrats’ think tank, is named after a file used by the Commodore 64, an 8-bit personal computer released in 1982, while the Christian Democrats’ CNetz sounds familiar to all those in Germany who used a mobile phone back in the early 1990s. The original C-Netz was a mobile network notorious for its crackling and unstable connections.
The left—the Social Democrats and the Greens—is particularly uncomfortable with the rise of the Pirates. The Greens have already lost their status as “the young party,” with middle class families split up into Green voters (the parents) and Pirate supporters (the kids). And the Pirates continue to steal votes away from the Social Democrats, disrupting the latter’s election arithmetic. This has dimmed any prospect of a red-green majority in the 2013 general election; the Pirates themselves have ruled out the possibility of joining any coalitions until the 2017 elections.
It is Angela Merkel, the chancellor, who has the least to fear from a strong Pirate Party, and she could well benefit from its rise. Her coalition with the embattled Free Democratic Party was unlikely to last beyond next year’s election, even before the Pirates started taking large chunks of the liberal vote. The likely addition of another small party to the Bundestag in 2013 changes the political equation, paving the way for a coalition between the two big centrist parties, Merkel’s Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, which would guarantee the chancellor four more years in power. She has engaged little with the Pirates so far, apart from publicly praising their rise and their goal to get more people interested in politics. Merkel’s refusal to criticise the Pirates too sharply is no surprise—the more votes they get, the better for her.
A cautionary note has come from Peter Altmaier, Merkel’s loyal henchman and environment minister. A founding member of CNetz, he is widely respected among the Pirates, and his Twitter banter with Christopher Lauer, speaker of the Pirate faction in the Berlin senate, entertains thousands of followers. After Altmaier’s recent appointment as minister, Lauer complained that “Altmaier has more followers than me now. I would like to denounce this.” Altmaier’s instant reply: “You will just have to become a minister yourself soon, otherwise things look bleak for you! :-)”. Altmaier acknowledges that traditional parties need to learn from the Pirates, but also warns that in time the Pirates too will lose their novelty, and become a party like any other. Coming from a political opponent, the Pirates should consider this a compliment—an acknowledgement that they are here to stay.
