The Pirate Party is expected to be getting as much of 9% of the votes in the upcoming parliamentary elections of the Berlin city-state. A completely non-traditional party that focuses on freedom of information, open access to technology, scrapping Church tax*, the dangers of surveillance and copyrighting excesses, etc. They protested against the bodyscanners at the airport too recently (by getting naked, heh).

Basically it focuses on civil rights, transparancy and equal opportunities. You can read their main goals here (in German) http://www.piratenpartei.de/unsere_ziele

More info on the election:

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15396744,00.html
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-1 ... r-win.html

Man, I wish I could vote for these guys...they represent my views a lot better than any mainstream party. Let's hope they expand internationally to other countries soon...they already have similar parties in Sweden (where it was founded) and Canada, so we can only hope! There's a small chance I may actually be moving to Berlin in the near future too.

*Church tax as in: tax paid by all German citizens to subsidize religious groups, not taxes paid by the Church. It's long been an eyesore for non-religious people, who have to pay for it anyway.

Yea, I like the pirate party. The US could totally use another party, one that's not populated by crazies (green party). Something that supports net neutrality, fighting the copyright police, big brotherism... hell yea. I suspect they'd pick up a lot of support pretty quickly.

Yeah, I can imagine such an agenda could be appealing to many, especially in the US. I'm afraid the two big parties are way too entrenched to actually make it possible to succesfully run such a party, though. The political system (winner gets it all) isn't very suited for that either. While I'm not generally a fan of the endless debating and powerlessness of coalition governments, it's clear from long running political systems like those of the UK and the US that the 'first-past-the-post' systems generally lead to stagnation and a consolidation of two massive parties (even if the Liberal Democrats have been doing pretty well in the UK recently). At least in a proportional representation system small parties can grow.

Anyway...all that just to bring you the good news: the Piratenpartei has received 8.9% (!!) of the vote in Berlin and has been elected into the state (Bundesland) parliament! 15 freaking seats!

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-party-en ... in-110918/

Apparently they're in 'trouble' now, as they don't have enough proper candidates to fill both the state and city district seats they've won in Berlin.

That's some good trouble to be in. I hope the party grows. Any idea what the vote % is for the big parties in Germany?

It's in the article.



close to 4th biggest party in state parliament of Berlin, hah! I hope the newfound funds to let the guys work professionally instead of as a hobby will get them even more success. I'm convinced there's a whole generation out there that doesn't feel any connection to the out of touch old guard parties, being born and raised on the internet. They need a voice.

Wait, what, you expected me to read or something? Jesus man... I know you don't follow my links 80% of the time either!

Unfortunately the embedded image doesn't seem to work... probably blocked from hot linking. So I actually will need to follow your link. *sigh*

I at least skim them most of the time, in case there's something like that graph in there!