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Members of the Pirate party casting their votes at a party meeting in Offenbach, Germany
Members of the Pirate party casting their votes at a party meeting in Offenbach, Germany. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP
Members of the Pirate party casting their votes at a party meeting in Offenbach, Germany. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP

The Pirate party rises as German politics is all at sea

This article is more than 11 years old
Were the Pirates to take 5% of the vote in 2013, it would be a game-changer for the party system. But what do they stand for?

The German protest vote has found a plug valve for what has for some time been known as Politikverdrossenheit: a feeling of being fed up with politics, that politicians are essentially corrupt, and that political programmes are made by minorities to serve minorities' interests.

The success of the Pirates can be explained by the fact that they surfed on this vague notion of fed-up-ness, combined with a progressive self-assessment of being anti-establishment and committed to drive "real change" in politics. It chimes with the "99%" movement in the US, or Spain's indignados, with one central message: politics, as it is, is no good for us. We want to participate differently, we want to be better informed, we do not want to be excluded any longer from the important debates. With this, the Pirates managed to establish themselves, in the space of less than a year, as the biggest grassroots movement against traditional policymaking. In several regional elections in Germany they achieved between 7% and 10% (and may get an estimated 8% at the forthcoming elections in North-Rhine Westphalia) of the votes. All this at a time, when one of the ruling coalition partners, the liberal FDP, needs to be satisfied with lousy 1.2%.

So far, what the Pirates promise is a rupture with the traditional structures of policy – they don't necessarily (yet) offer convincing ideas for policy change. However, with this promise, the Pirates have managed to overtake all the other self-defined protest-vote parties, such as Die Linke or the Greens – who in the meantime have managed to become quite old and bourgeois.

Many say that the Pirates are the new Greens, who served the same protest-vote function in the early 1980s. Forgotten are the times when a stone-throwing Joschka Fischer (who some 20 years later would become one of the most respected German foreign ministers) entered the Bundestag with trainers and sunflowers. But the Pirates and Greens cannot really be compared. The Greens didn't have much structure, but they had a lot of content: a fusion of the late 68-ers, anti-nuclear campaigners, environmentalists, feminist and – most importantly – the peace movement which found its biggest expression in the anti-Pershing US-missiles fight in 1983. All these factors enabled the Greens' breakthrough in 1983. None of this can be said for the Pirates, whose weakness is that atmosphere does not replace an electoral programme, activism does not provide knowledge on policies and openness does not produce a clear party line.

Nor are the Pirates the first to call for direct instead of representative democracy. The Greens also started like this, but since the times of Rousseau, it never worked – except perhaps in some counties in Switzerland.

The Pirates' most important slogan today is "liquid democracy": the idea that the internet could become the biggest platform for direct, real-time political debate, without any barriers to access. One central request of the Pirates is live-streaming of parliamentary sessions, for example in the Berlin senate, where the Pirates took, to everybody's surprise, about 10% of the seats last year. The question, however, will be who is able and willing to swim in this new bath of transparent information and who has enough time to spend on permanent policy steaming.

Live-streaming is important, but one should not forget that most Bundestag debates have already been available on TV in real-time for decades, transmitted by a special governmental broadcasting unit (though I have yet to meet anyone who has watched a whole debate). Empirical data suggests that the average attention span for politics is 15 minutes a day.

The Pirates appear conservative in the sense that there are close to no women in the party hierarchy. Looking at TV pictures of the first party congress meeting of the Pirates, it feels a bit like looking at a chess tournament, with a distinguished dress code of negligence.

Still, the Berlin republic is trembling about whether the Pirates will make the 5% threshold at the next general elections in September 2013, and the chances are high that they will. This would be the most important game-change for the German party system since the times of Konrad Adenauer. Consequences? Unknown.

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