German Pirate Party Surging To 2% Share on Votes, Polls S...

Poll Result (Source: Handelsblatt.com)

It is interesting to see that during the time span from week 28 to week 31 the share of Piratenpartei on votes appears to have doubled from approximately 1% to 2%. I still think that it is quite unlikely that the Piratenpartei will make their way over the 5% quorum hurdle this autumn; nevertheless, nobody can truthfully say to be sure that this won't happen.

In view of the more than doubling of the share on votes for Piratenpartei, other campaigners now start to get quite nervous. Any attempts of the established parties to start successful on-line campaigns (coming only remotely near to Obama's 'Yes We Can' Internet-supported campaign) turn out to be doomed as the members and supporters of the Piratenpartei are unchallenged set to to reign supreme the political climate on the Internet especially in the various influential social networking website communities.

A few months ago, Piratenpartei had simply been widely ignored by mainstream media as well as by exponents of mainstream political parties. This has changed; more and more politicians in particular of CDU/CSU and SPD feel pressed to attack Piratenpartei in order not to lose their mostly off-line supporters who are thought to love the rethorics of denouncing the Internet as a swine puddle of pornography and intellectual demise. Politicians of the Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and of the Linkspartei sometimes are attempting to chum up with the netizens, geeks and nerds supporting Piratenpartei, often with little success. It its quite difficult to assess the position of the Liberal Democrats (FDP) in this ongoing game.

It is for sure that the next German government will be based on some sort of multi-party coalition; there seems to be no room for any bet on any single party winning an absolute majority of seats. Today nobody can tell which coalitions might arithmetically be possible after the election in order to form a stable majority for the next government. But everyone knows that say, 2% to 4% of votes for Piratenpartei might under some circumstances be decisive for doing coalition arithmetic even if they do not have MPs in the next Bundestag because of it matters which of the established political parties will suffer most from the drain of young voters to the Piratenpartei. This explains the great nervousness of many players from established political parties.

The more votes Piratenpartei will gain on election day, the larger will be their direct and indirect political influence during coming years. If, for example, Piratenpartei wins a sensational share of 4%, they would gain not a single MP in the Bundestag. But such result would send a very strong signal to the established parties, and in this particular case especially to the Greens (Bündnis90/Die Grünen) and to the Left (Linkspartei) and, certainly to a lesser degree, to the Liberal Democrats (FDP) to the effect that the demands of this group of voters are to be taken quite serious.

It surely will be the same game as twenty years ago during the rise of the Greens: At first, all laughed at their ecological hobby-horses and everyone in the established parties was busy arguing that protection of the environment was either impossible or unnecessary or both. Today the Greens still are a quite small party far away from reaching an absolute majority but they have managed to inject elements of their primary agenda into all of the other parties. To some extent, greenery appears to be omni-present in SPD, CDU/CSU, and even in FDP.

Hence, I do expect that during coming years also Piratenpartei will manage to some extent to inject elements of their agenda into the programmatic bodies of other political parties.

But what exactly would that mean?

Well, as far as I can see by monitoring the unfolding of events on the Internet, currently the main focus of the political debate with and around the German Piratenpartei is centered around defending civil liberties, not about future politics concerning Intellectual Property law.

But this certainly does not mean that Intellectual Property law will get out of sight for the Pirates. However, it is open to what extent they are prepared to learn. For example, anti-copyright activists from the Swedish Piratpartiet had proposed to demand a general limitation of the term of protection to just five years. Interestingly a longer copyright protection term was immediately defended by Mr Stallman himself in an article titled 'How the Swedish Pirate Party Platform Backfires on Free Software'. Such occurrences surely will make supporters of the Pirate movement think twice when it comes to demands to curb IP rights. Unfortunately, the knowledge on patents appears to be much less widespread in those circles than that on copyright. Time will tell if there is a chance to see any meaningful discussion on the peculiarities of the patent system.