23.9.2006
Swedish Pirate Party to launch a national youth organisation
It did not take long for the Swedish Pirates to recover from their disappointment of not making it to the parliament on the first try. Active discussion on the future political activities is already going on in their forums, and new members keep joining the party daily. The party executives have kept their own post-election meeting and laid out their short and long term plans. In the long term the party will now strengthen its national organization that was put together quickly under the time pressure of the elections. The main long term targets will be success in the 2009 EU Parliament elections - where they will co-operate with other European pirate parties - and in the next Swedish parliamentary election in 2010. The party is still forced to operate on a minimal budget but now they get some extra income from the Relakks anonymizing service that they have helped to promote.
The main short term initiative declared by the party leader Rick Falkvinge will be the launching of a national political youth organization for the party. This organization, called Ung Pirat (Young Pirate), will serve as an umbrella organization for otherwise independent, locally operating pirate youth associations. This move was motivated by the promising success of the pirates in the
School Election 2006 - a special election organized for the older basic school and high school students mimicking closely the real parliamentary election. 1286 schools were involved, and a total of 381.896 votes were given in the election. The Pirate Party got 4.5% of the national votes despite having blank ballots only at their use in contrast to the parliamentary parties who had preprinted ballots provided by the Swedish election officials. In some schools the pirates got 20-30% of the votes, and the record was 40%. Now that there is time to build up the political movement, investing in the younger generation seems like a smart move to guarantee success in the future elections.