8.6.2006
Larger parties bend to support filesharing under political pressure
Following the example of the Swedish
Greens, the leaders of two larger Swedish parties,
Moderate Party (Moderaterna) and
Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet), have now also come out and declared a change in their filesharing politics, reports
Expressen. Both parties are now willing to review the new strict Swedish copyright laws so that they would allow domestic filesharing, despite the same parties voting for these strict laws just a year ago. "We cannot go chasing after a whole generation of young people", says Fredrik Reinfeldt, the leader of Moderate Party. "The idea was to address commercial piracy, not to chase private persons", says Lars Ohly, the Swedish Left Party leader. Both party leaders told that they had changed their minds after seeing the recent police actions against filesharers.
By challenging the established parties with their
3-point agenda the Pirate Party has already managed to cause a major shift in the Swedish political climate regarding filesharing. The Moderates are the second largest party in the Swedish parliament with their 55 seats; Left Party has 28 seats; the Greens, who joined the p2p bandwagon earlier, have 17 seats. Together their 100 seats represent a third of the Swedish parliamentary power. And all this has happened in just a couple of days, with three months still to go to the election. Filesharing
will be one of the central election themes in Sweden this time.
The main catalyst for the massive political shift has of course been the soaring popularity of Pirate Party. Now the established parties have realized that they risk losing votes to the Pirates not only from among younger voters but from all age groups in a country where filesharing is a national hobby. As for the young generation, results from a large national Youth Poll (mimicking Parliamentary election with the same candidates) were published yesterday. The established parties were going fast downhill while the great winners were Swedish Democrates (Sverigedemokraterna), a radically nationalistic right-wing party, and Pirate Party, which got 4.7 % of the votes - enough to take it to the Parliament in the real election. However, the poll was done before the Pirate Bay raid - an event that sent Pirate Party's popularity skyrocketing. The party has tripled its member count since the raid, now at 6324 members.