18.9.2006
Small party results starting to show
After the preliminary counting of the votes during the election night, the official counting began this morning at 8 am in all election districts. With the official counting the results for the small parties have also started to the appear to the
web pages of the election officials. A lion's share of small party votes seems to be going to the anti-immigration party Sverigedemokraterna (about 2.5 % of total votes); the Feminist Party seems to come strong second (about 1.2 %); and Pirate Party seems to take a similarly clear third place, its vote share being presently around 0.6 %. The best the pirates can wish for at this stage is to reach 1.0 % of the votes while the counting proceeds, which would make their task much easier in the next election as the Swedish state would print and distribute their ballot papers for them with that result.
The result will no doubt be a disappointment to the pirates who organized themselves fairly well and put up a good campaign despite having existed less than 9 months as a party. But then we have to remember that this was the very first time the emerging political pirate movement has tried to get to the parliament anywhere, and while the Swedes have been focusing on their own election campaign the movement itself has already started to spread around the world, especially in Europe.
The pirates have also already now managed to make a strong impact on the Swedish politics. All parties have had to take their stands on the filesharing issue, and right after the election the Green Party (the only succesful government party in the election) came out with a program demanding legalization of 'downloading' of copyrighted material from the net and only modest fines for public sharing of copyrighted material so that filesharing could not be used as an excuse for violating the privacy of net users with Big Brother type spying methods.