[philippK]

I'm from germany, and have voted for the pirate party in recent local elections.

I'd like to add a few things: 1. The german system of government is very much different from the US. In the US you have by-and-large a "winner takes it all" voting system. In germany, by contrast, we have a system of proportional representation. That means, winning 10% of the popular vote nets you 10% of the seats that are on the line in your voting district. That's why we currently have 6 parties in our federal parliament ("Bundestag") - where you have only 2 parties in congress.

2. Although this is "just" a poll it isn't meaningless. The pirate party has been steadily building up momentum in the last 2 years. They now are the 5th largest party by member count in germany. They have also scored surprisingly high wins in two recent regional elections, and are set to repeat those gains in the two upcoming elections.

3. The pirate party runs on a platform of systemic reform. They want copyright reformed to be more compatible with the 21st century. They want a reformed educational sector with more use of modern technology in the classroom, as well as improved structures (i.e. more freedom to pursue different educational models). They also want to reform the political system at large, by having more citizen participation in political decisions. They want more public votes on specific issues, as well as more transparency (For example: ACTA was negotiated in secret and only announced to the german public once the details were finished. They pirates strongly oppose such intransparency.)

This helped them to capture the votes of young, highly educated people. Many, but by no means all, from the "informatics" sector. They have also mobilized many first time voters, and re-energized many people who had formerly abandoned voting.

4. What's currently also helping them is the bad state of our government (the governing coalition is in disarray), their inability to answer to the challenges shaping our future, their corruption (our head of state recently had to resign in shame), their detachedness from concerns of everyday people. This greatly helps them to get the vote of people who are disaffected with the "established" parties and who are ready to give those "political youngsters" a chance.

It's by no means guaranteed, but they seem to be on the way of becoming a serious political force in germany.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

I have a lot of respect for the Pirate Party and I wish they'd put up some candidates where I could vote for them, but I have one question: how will they do "more citizen participation in political decisions" and avoid policy being set by tabloid headlines, and conservative populism. The basic problems of mob rule.

[philippK]

Well that is a good question.

The pirate party wants several steps in enabling more citizen participation.

First, they want to make government more transparent so that the people actually have all the information needed to make informed decisions on their hands. No longer do they want to accept that crucial legislation is often negotiated behind closed doors and only announced once everything is already sewn up. Also the contracts the government has with the private sector need to be made transparent. We need proper open data portals. There's a lot of things do to in this area alone.

Second, they want more votes on specific political issues on the regional, state and federal level. Those are currently only possible in very limited form (they are non binding for the government in most cases), and not at all possible at the federal level.

Third, their longterm vision includes a concept called "Liquid democracy" where basically everyone has the opportunity to have a voice in the political process. This will be facilitated using digital means. Specifically software called "adhocracy" / "liquid feedback" is being developed for this. The pirate party in germany already uses this system for their internal decision making.

It's a carefully balanced system comprised of direct voting on issues, and delegating voting power to representatives.

See here for more info on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_Democracy

http://liqd.net/en/

So i don't see the danger of inviting mob rule with the pirate party. As i see it, they want to open up the political system to more direct participation while keeping it stable enough to guarantee basic democratic freedoms (like minority protections)

[nickik]

"Second, they want more votes on specific political issues on the regional, state and federal level. Those are currently only possible in very limited form (they are non binding for the government in most cases), and not at all possible at the federal level."

The should really be looking at switzerland for some of this stuff. I think we handle this pretty nicly.

[morsch]

E.g. banning building mosques with minarets, while building Christian temples with bell towers is still allowed? Thanks, I'll pass.

[nickik]

Well yes this slipped threw because of the massive advertisment and fear politics. Its a flaw in the system, laws should first be checked on human rights and then blocked. I never said the swiss system is perfect.

I think if you look at the amount of bad laws produced this way compaird to how much bad laws most governments creat with there exlusion from the people its pretty clear witch fails more often.

In generall the "tyranny of the masses" is a problem in every democracy. I would trie to solve it with a very strong civil liberty laws and a court that can block laws that go against them, like they did in germany with the "Hacker tools" and Communication Storages Laws.

[r00fus]

No, this kind of thing should be thwarted by supreme laws, ie, a Constitution, which require a super-majority to change. "Religious Freedom" could be such a constitutional right, which would make such "tyranny of the majority" more difficult (but not impossible).

[Tichy]

I vote pirate, but I don't believe in direct democracy for the very reasons you state. Also I see it as a job of politicians to free me from having to do politics myself.

I vote for them because of other things, like transparency and freedom of the web. Unfortunately there never is a political party that satisfies everyone's needs to a 100%. Maybe some kind of new system could be invented to fix that, though.

[Egregore]

It seems that in Switzerland they manage to live quite well with direct democracy.

[Tichy]

Not sure how they do it. I don't think they decide everything by direct democracy, there only is an option to start a direct vote for some issue? I think that is possible in Germany in some cases, too.

[nickik]

Just some basic points how it works:

Ways to creat a law (lets take banning video games). If you are in one of the two houses of parlament you can put in a motion that tells what it is you want to achive. This gets votet on by both houses and if it pases both it gets to the bundesrat (witch are just the 7 big ministers, one for law, one for inner, one for outer ....) they have to produce a acctual law bases on that motion. This law gets then voted on by both houses. If it passes you have a new law. Jet it often happens that somebody does not like such a law, if that happens the can take a "referendum" with means that the have to get (i think) 50'000 signatures and that forces a real vote with the hole country. That happens quite often because the "referendum" is pretty easy to do.

An example of this whas when they wanted to join the EG, the right wing took the referendum and won the vote after that.

The other way is more people driven. If you want something to happen (a basic income or prhibitation of minaretts) you have to collect (i think) 100'000 signatures and this then again results in a vote.

Simular systems exist on "kantons" level. Witch would be like state in the US or bundesland in germany. There are 26 of those but the processes in all of them are pretty diffrent.

On the smallest level you vote most on old school village meetings.

So its not direct democracy but its pretty easy to force a vote almost anything.Witch result in voting farly often.

The last time I think I had to vote on 7 issus on state level and 2 on kanton level.

Examples: "Stop building second appartment" - Sombody had an issue that there was to much building of houses that where mostly empty in small old mounten towns. I did not pass.

"Book Price Binding" - Basiclly the wantet that the publisher could dictate a price that every seller had to keep. Staat mandatet monopoly, that got crashed too.

"6 Week of Holydays for everybody" - that was crashed too,

Cant remember any others.

You can do all of this pretty easly with letters almost no work.

(btw this is only what I remember Im not sure if I got all of the prcesses right)

[fromhet]

It seems true that mob rule == conservatism, but is that alwasys bad? Remember the SOPA/PIPA spectacle? The conservative mob hated it and fought to keep the internet as it is, and that was a good thing.

Conservative means to not want change for change's sake, and that can be a good thing sometimes.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

I agree about SOPA.

It's not so much fear of changes to come, but fear of the last few decades of change, and trying to get back to an idealised past. I'm in England. Tabloid-driven conservatism here tends to be xenophobic, homophobic, europhobic, ... basically panphobic.

Or that may be my liberal bias.

[unsigner]

There is little to no conservative populism in Europe; in Europe the political spectrum ranges from centrist (the so-called "popular" parties, passing for right-wing but still very much statist-oriented) to the extreme left, which is widely accepted and part of governing coalitions all over the continent.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> There is little to no conservative populism in Europe

I am in London. My experience has differed - we have the Daily Mail and the Murdock press tying to influence national policy, we have a party of the "mainstream left" whose actions last time around included "public-private partnerships" (privatisation of schools and hospitals), an expensive foreign war on flimsy grounds, surveillance state via CCTV and internet monitoring, active support for extraordinary rendition, and they wanted to extend detention without trial to 40 days.

Currently we're finding out via the Leveson inquiry just how powerful the Murdock press has become.

I don't find that to be "left" at all. Who would you classify as "extreme left" in this case?

[philippK]

Update: You'll find the exact polling data here: http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/forsa.htm (FORSA institute, showing the most recent poll where they are ahead of the greens) http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm (overall overview from different pollsters)

[_k]

They had it coming, considering how the Greens (in the EU) were flip flopping on ACTA. Do you happen to know what German parties ALDE http://www.alde.eu/ is linked to ? They are pro ACTA, so it would be interesting to know whether they lost a few percentage points as well ?

[febeling]

FDP is member of ALDE, which is the liberal democrats party. They are in a historic low in the polls recently. They are also part of the federal government coalition right now.

The FDP has most of the time been a very small party in popular votes, but are still seen as very established, since they traditionally join a coalition with another larger party (recently mostly CDU/conservatives), and so becoming a deciding factor, more so than their share of the vote would suggest. At the same time they are in most elections in danger of not winning any seats at all, since most elections in Germany have a threshold of 5% as a minimum you need to gain any seat via the proportional vote mechanism.

[stfu]

Should be worth mentioning, that the German Ministry of Justice is held by the Alde/Fdp party. Her strong stand on civil liberties is more or less the only thing keeping Germany from implementing the European telecommunications data retention act.

[brazzy]

Claims to be liberal but mainly supports business interests? Who else but the FDP could that be?

And, yep:

http://www.alde.eu/alde-group/national-delegation-elected-me... Germany: LAMBSDORFF Alexander Graf, Freie Demokratische Partei

And the FDP is currently disintegrating so vociferously it's almost comical to watch. But supporting ACTA has only a small part in that, if any.

[dan85]

Yes, they support business interests. In European politics, "liberal" does not have the same meaning as in US.

[brazzy]

As a European, I know that. My point is that the FDP tends to support business interests far more than civil liberties, especially when the two collide, as with ACTA.

[nickik]

Its funny that the people who use the world liberal mean something completly diffrent of what it meant 100 years ago. They call themselfs libertarians now. FDP and simular parties often use state power to help spezial intresst groupes, witch means that they help businesses but they do not help the economy.