* Swedish Net War diary *

[JackSpratts]

i wish the pirate party all the best in these swedish elections. it's an important time, and not just for them but for us all.

- js.

[TankGirl]

30.8.2006

Another membership landmark for Pirate Party

The Swedish Pirate Party has reached another membership landmark after passing the membership of the Green Party recently. With its 8521 members PirateParty is now larger than Moderate Youth League (Moderata Ungdomsförbundet), the youth organization of Moderaterna, the second largest party in Sweden. The Moderate Youth League was founded in 1934 as Young Swedes (Ungsvenskarna) and most top Moderate Party politicians have started their political career in its ranks, including the present chairman of the Moderate Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt. The next membership challenge for the pirates will be to reach the Left Party with its estimated 11.000 members, presently sitting in the governing coalition with Social Democrats and the Green Party.

The growing membership of Pirate Party is in obvious conflict with the 'official' opinion polls that keep showing marginally small support for the Pirate Party. This has made part of the press doubt Pirate Party's membership figures not being somehow real. But a closer scrutiny reveals that there is little room for errors in party's membership figure: the total member count is a sum of local figures coming from over 250 electorate districts, and each district head can check the validity of their own component in the sum anytime. No discrepancies have been reported by any of them. So if the membership figure seems factual and is in conflict with the opinion polls, then maybe the opinion polls are wrong? In 18 days we will know.

[TankGirl]

12.9.2006

Only six days to the election

The Swedish parliamentary election is getting real, real close. Next Sunday, only six days from now, the Swedish voters - including over 400.000 first time voters - will have their saying on who will sit in country's parliament for the next four years - and whether the Pirates will be among them. On the election evening itself the election officials can promise to give results only for the seven parties currently in the parliament - the 'small parties' will have to wait for their own results at least till Monday. The reason for this is the limitations in the computer system of the election officials.

[TankGirl]

15.9.2006

Optimism in the pirate camp

As the election day draws closer there is cautious optimism in the pirate camp based on various polls that keep popping up at accelerated rate. Synovate Temo, one of the established polling institutions, is now suddenly showing 1.5 % support for Pirate party where in earlier polls party did not show up at all. These 'official' polls are likely to underestimate the real support for the pirates as they are mostly modern technology users who have long since switched to using mobile telephones, and the polling institutions still keep ignoring mobile telephone users in their polls. Various online polls and different school and special group 'test elections' have been indicating support figures in the range 10-20 %. Despite being a fresh party, the pirates have got their election machine working fairly well towards the end of the race, so the Swedes have become conscious of the pirates as a serious alternative. The membership keeps growing with dozens of new members every day. The membership-vote ratio in previous elections have been around 30. If the ratio would hold for the pirates too, with its present 9081 members Pirate party would get some 272.000 votes - this would be enough to take them to the parliament. So the chances for the victory and political breakthrough are definitely there. As the polls at the same time indicate a tight balance between traditional left-right blocks, getting into the parliament would also be likely to give the pirates just what they have been looking for from the beginning: a balance of power position where they could negotiate a good deal with either of the main blocks to drive through their agenda.

What if Pirate Party does not reach the 4 % vote thresold? Anything from 1 % upwards would still be valuable for them as a party. In the next election they would get their ballot papers printed and distributed by the state instead of having to pay and distribute them themselves as they have done now. Depending on the result they might also be able to employ some full time party workers at state's expense for the next 4 year parliamentary period.

[TankGirl]

17.9.2006

Active election day in Sweden

According to Swedish Television, the Swedes have been voting actively in their parliamentary election today. The queues have been hours long in some voting places but everything has gone smoothly and people have waited patiently for their turn to vote.

The doors of voting places will close two hours from now, and at that same moment the Swedish TV will start its traditional 'Valvakan' show - a special program covering the counting of the votes and analysis of the results late to the night. Party leaders and other key people will of course be interviewed a number of times, and live coverage will be provided from the various venues where the members of different parties have gathered to spend the evening. No official results for the small parties - including Pirate Party - will not be available today but should any interesting information about the pirates pop up during the Swedish Valvakan, I will pass it to you.

[TankGirl]

18.9.2006

Center-right coalition wins in the election, pirates unlikely to get to the parliament

As the counting of the votes continued late into the night in Sweden, the main result of the election started to become clear: Swedes will have a new government soon. The center-right 'Alliance' consisting of four parties seems to get a clear enough majority to form the next coalition government for Sweden. The Alliance victory was due to the sensational success of The Moderate Party - their share of votes was now 26.1 - almost 11 % more than in the previous election, promising to give them 97 seats in the new parliament where they now have only 55 seats. The chairman of the Moderate Party, Fredrik Reinfeldt, will evidently become the next prime minister of Sweden. The present prime minister Göran Persson has already announced to leave his post as the party leader of the Social Democrats due to the poor election result. The Left Party also lost a lot of votes while the Green Party was the only member of the present government coalition to increase its support.

How did the Pirate Party do? All we know at this stage is that the total share of votes for the small parties was 5.7 % - no information about the breakdown of these votes between different small parties is yet available. This share is 2.6 % more than in 2002 parliamentary election but it still seems too small to give Piratpartiet realistic chances to cross the 4 % vote thresold. Judging from the comments on Pirate party's discussion board the pirates themselves do not seem to believe they have made it to the parliament. So they are merely wishing to have a large enough share of that 5.7 % to get certain benefits for the party for its future political work. Even a 1.0 % share of votes would benefit them as they would get the expensive printing and laborous distribution of voting ballots done by the state election officials in the next election. 2.5 % is the next interesting limit, as that would entitle the party to financial support from the Swedish state - the more above 2.5 %, the larger the support.

[TankGirl]

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.

[TankGirl]

19.9.2006

German Pirate Party goes official

While the Swedish pirates were beginning the last week of their election campaign and the international focus of the pirates was keenly on Sweden, 53 founding members of the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland) gathered together in Berlin to formally found this sister party to the Swedish Piratpartiet. The founding on September 10th was preceded by a long, active and thorough online discussion on the political principles and the agenda of the new party. Like the Swedish Pirate Party, the German sister party defends the freedom of private citizens to exchange culture and knowledge with each other, is highly critical of the ongoing efforts to build a Big Brother style control society and demands reforms to the patent system which has in practice turned against its original idea of inciting innovation for the good of the entire society.

[TankGirl]

21.9.2006

Final results of the Swedish election ready

The official counting of the votes has been finished in Sweden. Pirate Party ended up as the third largest of the 'small parties' with 34.918 votes, competing tightly for the second place with the Feminist Initiative that took 37.954 votes. By far the largest small party was the anti-immigration party Sweden Democrats who took 162.463 votes, only some 50.000 votes shy of getting their candidates through to the parliament.

The result means that on the average every registered Pirate Party member managed to get about 3 other voters to cast their vote for the pirates. Even if the result did not bring the much-desired parliamentary power to the pirates, they managed to establish themself as a serious candidate in the coming elections, and they will certainly not be ignored by the Swedish media in the future as an insignificant small party. They also managed to make filesharing and privacy issues an important election theme, and the public debate on these issues continues in Sweden.

The Swedish political climate has been very mobile during recent years. This is highlighted by the poor success of June List. This small party had a sensational success in the EU Parliament election in 2004 capturing 14% of the Swedish votes and three EU parliament seats. In this election Pirate Party won June List with a margin of almost 9000 votes.

[TankGirl]

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.

[TankGirl]

22.10.2006

Expressen: "Legalize filesharing!"

The election is over, a new government has been formed, and while Piratpartiet did not make it to the parliament, the Swedish filesharing debate continues in the media.

Newspaper Expressen demands in its editorial today in no uncertain terms the legalization of private filesharing. The editorial refers to the two recent court cases that resulted in rather large fines for two filesharers. The newspaper considers it totally wrong that sharing a few songs or a movie on Internet is treated as serious a crime as sexual harassment or acts of violence in terms of punishment. Expressen notes that while harassment and violence cause real suffering to the victims, it is not clear at all whether there are any victims or negative effects following from filesharing.

Expressen goes through some history of previous legal battles where the copyright holders have tried to fight new emerging technologies, and how their doomsday scenarios have never happened despite the wide adoption of these new technologies - like audio cassette and video recorders - by the consumers. The newspaper is deeply worried about the impact that a strong copyright owner control over Internet would have on culture and many fields of new businesses. The editors consider the legalization of private filesharing a much better alternative and demand that movie and music industries should adapt into the digital era without any help from the state.