The national Congress of Luxembourgian Pirates was held two weeks ago in Wasserbilling. On this occasion, the party’s future programming guidelines were defined.
Building on the success achieved by their German fellows in Berlin State election, (as documented in this newspaper by the article Modern Pirates, 21 October 2011) the President Sven Clement, who has been recently reconfirmed at the head of the party, outlined the path leading to 2014 general elections.
The defeat in last month’s elections does not discourage Pirates’ leaders, according to whom such a failure was due to economic reasons. For local elections, indeed, parties do not receive the same state subsidies allocated for general elections. Clement argues, “Elections cannot be prepared in a few months, we need to start to work now”. And now party’s keywords are clear.
First of all, the Pirate party needs to redefine itself. The fact, indeed, of being considered as the “Internet party” limits the sphere of action of its policy. Clement, who is perfectly aware of that, during the Congress repeatedly restated this point. He explained that his party focuses on a number of goals all aiming at defending citizens’ rights. Undoubtedly, it has been deeply influenced by its first “battles”, such as those for the free Internet and against copyright, but pirates have undergone an evolution and have added new themes to their programme, not only those related to the Web. Obviously, these themes are all modelled on the principle of horizontality, which is typical of the Web.
One of the main points of Luxembourgian pirates’ policy is the clear separation of the State from any religious community, not only Catholic Church. Other points of their agenda are knowledge sharing, the protection of privacy and the development of a more direct democracy. Clement believes, indeed, that the excessive use of CCTV surveillance systems and telecommunication operators represent a danger for the protection of people’s private life.
Because such societies are required to register and store for six months the data regarding users, they can outline all the physical movements these people make. According to pirates, this practice implies an excessive and unjustified intrusion into citizens’ private life who, more and more often, risk becoming Big Brother’s victims, the unaware protagonists of George Orwell’s novel, 1984.
These are the goals pirates want to achieve, but they will have to face many challenges in order to prove they are able to convince a much wider web of people.
On the inside: