Pirates are boarding Berlin. In the recent Berlin State election, the rise of the Pirate Party, whose campaign initially focused on file sharing, was a real surprise. It attracted 8.9% of the vote, gathering the transversal preferences of the deceived supporters of the left, the liberals and the Greens and it snatched fifteen seats in the Parliament. These MPs will join the ranks of the opposition, because the Mayor, Klaus Wowereit of the SPD, should form an alliance with the Christian Democratic Party, proposing again the Große Koalition which governed Germany until two years ago.
But who are these Pirates? Is it possible that the malware spreads all over Germany, upsetting the political balance of the country? Founded in January 2006 in Sweden (where in the last European election it attracted 7.1% of the vote) and in September of the same year in Germany, the German P-Partei is very popular among young voters. The top candidate of the Berlin branch of the Pirate Party was Andreas Baum, a 33-year-old electronic engineer who has immediately appeared very self-confident. Wearing jeans and a T-shirt, he briefly explained the programme of the party: free means of transport, free W-lan in Berlin, drug education (which aims at informing youths on the risks related to drug use) and – generally – more direct democracy and higher political transparency.
In other words, in politics as well as in the society, Pirates want to put the freedom and immediacy that are typical of the Internet. These are two supranational values: the Web, indeed, gave Icelandic citizens the chance to personally rewrite the new Constitution, after the collapse of their economy. The sessions of the constituent assembly were streaming live and everyone could intervene.
The Internet world and its social effects are now legitimately part of the political agenda of Angela Merkel’s Government. A few days ago it was reported that the Government will finance a project called “Internet Privacy”, carried out by the German Academy of Science. A team of researchers will study the social dimension of the Internet, in order to create an actual “culture of trust”. Could this programme be that virus checker able to stop the rise of the Piratenpartei within the German political landscape? That seems quite improbable. According to a survey carried out by FORSA and published this week, the P-P would be unrelenting, attracting 10% of voters on the national level.
The detractors of Pirates and the sceptics claim that the programme of the Pirate Party is not well defined and have criticized the lack of women in the list; actually there is only one woman, Susanna Graf, born in 1992. And so, among the fifteen candidates elected, there are two men aged more than 40 years, many youths aged less than thirty years and a 19-year-old girl. We will know them better in the next weeks.
On the inside: