What about the Pirate Party?
The German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) has reached 2% at their first Bundestag elections. This is a very great start considering that the Greens could only get 1.5% at their first Bundestag elections in 1980. Nowadays the Greens are an political party achieving results of about 10 percent.
What is the Pirate Party?
The Pirate Party tries to create an antipole against the increase claim for more and more surveillance. They consider surveillance as harmful and want to strengthen civil rights again. Former governments have passed a lot of laws allowing deeper intrusions into private life.
Moreover, the Pirates want to increase the privacy of citizens against companies. The last government wanted to pass a "very strong law" against business with personal data. Due to protests of companies and parties fighting for them nothing has really changed. Companies are still allowed to sell addresses. This can only be undone if you explicitely tell that company not to use your data, but who will have the time to do this for every company? What if the company has "lost" your email or "did not receive" it?
Another part of the Pirates' program is a reform of the copyright law to increase cultural exchange and stop restrictions like digital rights management (DRM) only allowing you to copy a song some times, only using it on special devices etc.
Will the Pirates enter a parliament in the future?
It will now become very interesting if the Pirate Party can continue their political activity for at least 4 more years until there are the next elections for the Bundestag. An important help for this long journey are probably the elections of the state parliaments. If they will go on and inform people of their aims, they will probably receive even more votes in the next elections. The Greens were able to enter the parliament already at their second elections for the Bundestag (1983).
Depending on the actions of the new government the Pirate Party could probably follow suit. Since the Pirate Party cares about privacy, they will probably gain more power within the next four years. The CDU usually shortens civil rights and is for more company rights and although the FDP claims to care about civil rights, they want to enlarge the rights of the companies (e.g. selling personal data). Therefore, the concerns about privacy could increase and more voters might vote for the Pirates next time.
Moreover, the EU will probably come out with some new laws cutting civil rights. Therefore, even if the current coalition would be totally pro-Pirates (which it definitely will not) there would still be supranational politicians (EU level) who could lead to stronger Pirate Parties (or creations if there is no Pirate Party in a certain state yet) in all member states of the EU.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
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