Pirates are capturing Germany’s political system.
The party with the outlaw name started as a marginal club of computer nerds and hackers demanding online freedom, but its appeal as an antiestablishment movement has lured many young voters to the ballot boxes, catapulting it into two state parliaments in less than a year.
Polls show the all-volunteer Pirates — who offer little ideology and focus on promoting their flagship policies of near-total transparency and an unrestricted Internet — as the country’s third-strongest political force, leapfrogging over more established parties.
The tremendous success has doubled the Pirates’ membership to 25,000, but it has also handed the party a crucial challenge: A party founded as a rebellious upstart must reckon with its new political power and its promise of a voice for all of its members.
As 2,000 members gathered in the northern Germany city Neumuenster to discuss the group’s growth on Saturday, new polls predicted it would win seats in two more state legislatures in May, with forecasters expecting them to secure about 9% of the vote in both states.
Analysts say that despite the country’s robust economy and low unemployment, many Germans — like others around the world — are disenchanted with the established parties, fuelled by outrage over seeing the government bailing out banks and businesses to save the economy from collapsing in the wake of the financial crisis.
Thousands in Germany took to the streets last year in protest rallies supporting the worldwide Occupy movement, but it has now all but fizzled out — with the Pirates appearing to inherit the votes of the disenchanted.
While the mainstream parties in Europe’s biggest economy are struggling to come up with a response to the continent’s debt crisis, the Pirates cheerfully admit that they have no answer to the questions raised by the crisis. Nor do they have a stance on whether German troops should continue to fight in Afghanistan.
But many voters welcome their blunt acknowledgment as a sign of honesty in the political arena. Instead of taking a stand on the pressing issues that more mainstream parties are forced to address, the Pirates demand that public transportation be free of charge and that every citizen be paid a basic income without having to work.
The party’s core pledge of full transparency and participation — live transmission of all meetings and the online involvement of all party members in its decisions, countless Twitter debates and email chains — is reaching the limit of feasibility as the number of party members has mushroomed.
The question is: Will the Pirates change Germany’s political system, or will the system crack the Pirates?
The party’s outgoing managing director Marina Weisband collapsed last week between two television show appearances. She was briefly hospitalised, saying she was just heavily overworked. The 24-year-old has now joined the ranks of some top Pirates who advocate for having professional leaders running the party. Some are also proposing that the party’s leaders should have a greater say in shaping the Pirates’ policies.
Pirate parties are now present in several European countries, but only in Germany have they skyrocketed to such success. In Sweden, where the movement originated, the party won 7% of the vote in European Parliament elections 2009 but less than 1% in national elections the next year, making it a marginal party, albeit with a strong voice on cyber issues.