German Pirate Party overtakes Greens on latest poll
todayszaman.com
todayszaman.com
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.
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.
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.
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
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)
The should really be looking at switzerland for some of this stuff. I think we handle this pretty nicly.
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.
Conservative means to not want change for change's sake, and that can be a good thing sometimes.
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.
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.
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)
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?
On the long run I see them around 8 to 10 percent, depending on region (more in cities) and which positions they take in areas like education, finances, taxes... At least if they can stabilize their internal structure and avoid the problems I mentioned. But this will be enough to make them interesting as a partner in coalitions, especially together with the Green Party and that way forcing the established parties to rethink their own positions.
This will omnly happen when governments and businesses stop trying to take away our freedom, i.e. not soon.
> That's a similar situation as the Green party had to face many years ago, when they had managed to establish laws to protect the environment.
Well, the Green Party still exists, and is doing rather well in Germany.
2) Yes, because they managed to move from a single focus to become a party with an established program and well known politicians. But they have very similar voters and so that new party is partially splitting forces. The Green Party will maybe react by adjusting their program in Pirate direction.
But of course a lot of things can happen and we will see. At least this Pirate success will show certain interest groups to be careful about their actions. A party that can jump above 10% out of nothing just about a single item of interest was something not expected by them. They will have to recon with that force.
Then your imagination is sorely lacking. I can guarantee that their popularity will severely decline within the next 5 years, because right now they are attracting a lot of "protest voters" who have little interest in their actual programme and simply vote for them because they attack the established parties in some way. This kind of thing always cools off after a while (just look at Die Linke).
Whether the Pirate Party can survive at depends on how they deal with that when (not if) it happens. I'm pretty sure they will, since their core points of informational freedom and transparency are still getting more relvant.
They had an absolutely ridiculous amount of (free) media coverage during the Pirate Bay trial, the FRA-law (that gave the government the ability to snoop on internet traffic crossing the border) and ACTA (a law written by the media industry to help and prioritize illegal file sharing) but, they have never breached the 4% barrier required to get in parliament in Sweden.
While the outrage during the FRA-law was quite impressive (more impressive on the internet than on the streets unfortunately) both ACTA and the FRA-law passed, and today I don't know if I've heard anything about the Pirate party in Sweden for the last year (I hear much more from the Pirate party in Germany - a few years ago I believe the exact opposite was true (that the Pirate party in Sweden was by far the most successful in Europe)).
I hope I'm wrong but I don't see how the Pirate party will ever get into parliament in Sweden and the only thing I can hope for is that the German, and other, Pirate parties will be successful and that that result in changes within the EU as well as reignite the spark in Sweden.
But I barely even dare to hope on anything.
I welcome the German pirates for several reasons:
- "the discussion it brought up is already very beneficial."
- they have a high turn out of former non-voters
- "harmless stupidity": The German pirates seem to be ambivalent as of now. For instance, they are the only left-wing party that's not in favor of female employee quotas (an idea so absurd, there's not even an english wikipedia entry http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenquote). If they dig deeper into this populist lefty anti-authoritarian theme (as it seems to be the case) the first thing they will achieve is less votes for the other left-wing parties.
And personally, I think this would be a good thing (see "female employee quotas").
I think it's unlikely that they'll embrace a full blown "Frauenquote" (funny how there isn't an english wikipedia entry for it ^^), because the discussion inside the party (i am not a member) seems to be going in a direction they call "post gender". I think this post gender idead, by and large, is a good one.
I hope they'll pursue this path more, bringing an approach of true equality to politics instead of the "gender fights" other left-leaning parties like to put on the political stage.
How does that follow?
I hope I made myself clear.
Another big factor seems to be that the German Bundeskanzler has the sole power to decide policy and choose his ministers, so having parties form a solid majority to elect and support him is very important. In Switzerland, the government consists of the seven Bundesräte, who are peers and elected independently by the parliament. They rotate at being the Bundespräsident (formal head of government), who does not have special powers.
This is, however, purely a custom; formally, the Bundespräsident is elected.
Since 1959 the four main parties has effectively voluntarily split the federal council between them based on parliamentary representation to rather than risk being left outside government for any length of time.
The distribution of seats follows a formula agreed by those parties, so it's not "news" that the council keeps pretty much the same party composition election after election.
Most other countries don't have any long standing arrangements like that, so the question of who will form the government is always a major subject in advance of elections.
Well it has been broken anyway, the right wing basiclly kicked out both of there ministers witch led to the split of that party. The biggest party ended up with no seat in the Bundesrat (Top 7). Now they have one again but he has the militäry and nobody cares about that :)
What is different in germany, though, is that the discussion here revolves around forcing private sector enterprises to have specific (government set) quota of women in their leadership (or else be punished by the law).
Affirmative action in the US seems to revolve more around not negatively discriminating against women when making hiring decisions, but not forcing government set quotas on companies.
I can't quite imagine the US government interfering with private enterprise in this way.
Affirmative action is when two people are equally suited for a job/position/benefit, the one from the disadvantaged group (based on sex, ethnic/socioeconomic background, physical impairment, ...) gets it. In more extreme varieties, it means that the one from the disadvantaged group has less strict requirements to fulfill. In a way, a women's quota is a species of the genus affirmative action.
About the Pirate Party's take on this: I don't think there's a mature consensus yet. According to a recent poll (http://www.taz.de/!89247/) only 6 percent sees the party as postgender.
I would really like to see some groups against copyright/patent madness AND against public spending/over taxation madness we have been struggling with for the last decades. Unfortunately, it seems that in Europe those ideas tend to polarize between 2 'very' different groups such as left (and not even all) for the copyright thing and right (and not even all) for the taxes thing. And that's why I do not vote.
All the other parties embrace, as we call it here, "social capitalism" to varying degrees.
So, in germany, you mainly have the choice between several "left leaning" parties.
When measured by US standards, most our parties are "socialist".
Finally, as there is no pure socialism/capitalism, I believe we should look at few simple things. For example, effective taxation (together with mandatory helthcare and pension) on the individual should not be 50% of his income (and it is in Italy, for example); public spending should not be 50% of GDP either. Let's start from here...
I agree that we need to throw away this rules and lot of burocracy. I think the BGK is a nice system if you want to have a social system and a pension system without giving the government real controll of the people (Gov. part of GDP would rise but the controll would be a lot less).
Taxation needs to be simpler, the current system is all about spezial intresst. Its a difficuled field but there are many ideas.
If the Pirate Party would form a coalition e.g. with the Union party, they would have to negotiate a coalition agreement. And each party will make sure that they please their clients (i.e. their voters or other supporters) sufficiently. So the Pirate Party would probably abandon their weaker positions (e.g. economic policy), but hold their ground on their main topics (copyright/patents etc.).
Heres the short version:
Generally I agree and I would like to see that too.
About PP:
1. Basic Income (BGE) is a very liberal socal policy(something I could see Friedman or Hayek support). It rases the amount of GDP on the government side but takes away a lot of the controll and bureaucracy that is there now.
2. The want to take away alot of state power too, specially in police and military. Think about what massiv change there drug policy would make.
3. The are the only ones that I could ever see attacking finance. Because (a) the are young (b) not infiltrated by lobbiests (yet) (c) currage to trie something diffrent (think out of the box) (d) efficent use of tools and communication (work on the buget like a opensource project would be something worth trying)
Rather have liberal statist with a social side then conservativ statist with love for police (CUD) or hardcore statist like (SPD).
Actually Friedman (I assume you're talking about Milton Friedman here, since there are several prominent economists named 'Friedman' nowadays) advocated just that in 1962 in 'Capitalism and Freedom', albeit in the form of a negative income tax.
Hayek did support it on more philosophical grounds, because he thought it would increase individual freedom. Almost the exact opposite reasoning as some libertarians, actually. It's common for libertarians to argue that social programs should be handled by private charity, but Hayek worried that doing so leads to collectivism, because people feel bound to social cliques that provide social safety for their members (ethnic groups, churches, etc.), and fear leaving the groups lest they lose their insurance. So he would prefer there be a society-wide safety net not tied to these cliques.
I kept forgetting where he had written that, so I excerpted a quote in my mini-scrapbook here: http://www.kmjn.org/snippets/hayek79_minimumincome.html
They are new, they are cool, they have an "anti-authoritarian" vibe, they will achieve nothing and be forgotten in a couple of years.
The funny thing is, the "Greens" are considered old, they have achieved nothing (there's still a massive oil dependency, there are still nuclear reactors, ...) and now they panic :)
Edit: the Pirates can gain traction by promising people "if we only had the power, we could do this or that" and they can increase their popularity by simply critisizing the current parties in power ("we would have it done some other way, we would have [insert popular opinion]") but in the end they will change nothing, just read up on the history of the Greens and just replace the name with Pirates
"We're the New Green Movement," Says Pirate Party Founder
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elisabeth-braw/pirate-party_b_...
edit: just realized I'm replying to the person interviewed in my link!
It's true that the Pirate Party is right now getting attention and votes through hype and protest voters, and that they choose their stances based on ideals rather than realism. They'll have all kinds of problems when these things change (as they will have to).
But the Greens are a perfect example for a new party that pulled through all this and became firmly established because their core issue is important enough.
It sounds you are with the Greens from your statement (Disclaimer 2: I voted for them in the years before).
Saying that the Pirates are basing their stances on idealistic views might be fine. Using that as a contrast to a party that more or less embodied idealistic (and sometimes unrealistic) positions for as long as I followed their way seems awkward to me.
Yes, the Greens matured. I .. think one of the reasons is that there's a generational gap now. Around me, Greens are represented by people in their 40s-50s that - while still believing in the core environmental values - gave up a little and made peace with a more realistic (as you put it) stance.
The Pirates, for me, are what the Greens probably (wasn't there, in my early 30s here) were for my parents generation..
My bottom line: I agree that the Greens are/were important. But it doesn't make sense to ignore the similarities in 'idealism', the youth factor etc. - the Pirates are what the Greens couldn't be. It's a failure of the Greens that they couldn't capture the young generation. In spirit they are similar. In practice, the Greens grew up. Became mature, parents (or grand parents) and (Disclaimer 3: obviously this whole piece is one big opinionated mess) old and boring.
The Pirates are very similar to what the Greens were. They may "mature" in the same way, or in a different way, or they may disintegrate, but just like the Greens, they definitelly will not forever be the hip, rebellious party that voters flock to who are disillusioned by established parties.
After 30 years of the greens being in the Bundestag, we now have the largest percentage of renewable energy in europe (>20% of our energy already comes from it), even the most conservative of parties now subscribe to quitting nuclear energy altogether (7 reactors have been shut down already, the rest is to follow until 2021) , we have the strictest environmental laws in europe, and on and on.
I would say the greens have been very successful by any measure.
Yes and that's what the Pirates will do. Some ideas will no longer be expressible in mainstream politics, because it will be political suicide to do so, such as: support for disconnecting people from the internet, prosecuting file sharers, paywalled academic journals, software patents, pervasive internet surveillance, etc.
Source? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_Europe... contradicts this
The other countries in europe that have more renewables than we have are mostly smaller countries that don't have the population or industrial output that germany has.
The numbers in the article you cite are also terribly outdated. Some more up to date numbers can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany#St...
As you can see there germany has made BIG advances in the amount of renewable energy produced, as well as its overall share of energy consumed.
My point was: * Germany was 20years ago pretty conservative about energy, relying mainly on coal, gas and nuclear.
Then the green party came into the political landscape and now * We are on the forefront of converting our highly industrous economy completely to renewable energies. No other country in europe has increased the amount of renewabled energy produced by 5x in the last 10 years alone. At this rate, we will be overtaking even the smaller countries that may have more renewables than we have now. * We are the only country of this size and economic gravitas that is fully committed to quiting nuclear. * We have very strict environmental protection laws, with environmental protection even enshrined in the national constitution , more so than in other industrous european countries (yes there's always switzerland or other small countries that are nominally "better" at this but you can not compare their impact or structure with large countries such as germany) See also: http://www.goethe.de/ges/umw/ein/en5099932.htm * Gas is more expensive in germany than elsewhere in europe (again there might be exceptions) because of "ecological taxing" that was proposed by the green party
So, in all what i wanted to say was: Germany has changed a great deal due to the green party in the last decades. Where once we were very conservative about ecological ideas, we are now at the forefront, if not the sole leader, in many of these areas. And that is,to a large degree, thanks to the greens because they have put those issues on the agenda again and again - and that way changed the political discourse at large.
I will vote for them, because in some important areas of politics they have the better offer.
And because say don't try to say things in a "politically correct" way, but just say it. No professional spokes persons, media professionals, image professionals, etc. They are (for now) just people with an option.
The pirate party promised to represent the real people, it is written in their genes that they want to prevent politicians being politicians just for the sake of power. For example the discussions sometimes go so far that they think their representatives in parliament should only act like puppets executing the decisions made by online votes.
Whether they'll manage to deliver is another question, but they don't claim to have all the answers and their intentions are pure.
The thing is, that lack of answers is often held against them. But if you think about it, the other parties don't have the answers either. They just stumble through blunder upon blunder (for example dealing with the financial crisis). It's just a human fallacy to assume somebody who takes a firm stance is also competent (this was even shown in psychological experiments).
And that's what their long term vision also includes: Large scale, direct, participation (using digital means) of many people in the political process. They call this concept "Liquid democracy"
See here for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_Democracy
That being said, I see absolutely no reason why the Pirates should be part of the government. Germany has had almost 20 years of policy blocking and mindlessly bullying oppositions (from both sides of the political spectrum), but maybe this can actually change with the Pirates - an opposition that has no problem in granting the governing parties their successes.
How's Spain more predictable? I am sure they could use some Pirates too.
edit: some more information: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,826540,00...