17.8.2006
Pirates back in the media
With only a month to the Swedish parliamentary election, the Pirate Party is again very much in the headlines. Following the party-sponsored launching of the anonymizing service Relakks the visitor counts on party's website have skyrocketed, and the membership has started to grow rapidly again. With its 8168 members the party is clearly larger than the Greens (7249 members) and may well catch Moderata ungdomsförbundet (8503 members), the youth section of Moderaterna, the second largest party in Sweden.
Opinion polls give mixed messages about party's prospects in the election. On all online polls the pirates have been doing very well while more traditional polls based on phone calls to voters give almost insignificant support figures for them. One reason for this discrepancy may be the fact that the phone polls are still targeting only people with old fashion landline phone connections while virtually all younger and more modern Swedes have long ago switched to using cellular phones only. Should the pirates turn out to be succesful in the election, the polling institutes will seriously have to consider updaing their old fashioned sampling practices to avoid systematic errors. On September 17 we will know.
The NordicBet betting odds for the Pirate Party are 1:20 at the moment.
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