What I know of the Pirate Party is that they are suffering for their own collective weakness and inability to organize.

It is a fallacy that 'safety in (representative) numbers' is a way to organize a movement; big social movements need leaders who are able to demonstrate the cause, and Liquid Democracy dilutes this fact as much as it can - not because its proponents want to be successful, but because the idea of a benign leadership is abhorrent to those who want 'no leaders'.

Like it or not, we live in a world where nothing gets done if it depends on a committee to do it. This is a very difficult thing for the Pirate Party to deal with; since almost everything the Party tries to do must conform to the rules of consensus implied by the Liquid Democracy policies.

The Pirate Party's leadership is hamstrung by the requirement to get approval for everything, from their masses. Everything.

Eventually, the same thing will happen to the Pirate Party that happened to Socialism: its proponents will learn that capitalisation is very important to getting new ideas propagated among the masses. So far, the PP does not represent much of great value to the individual, and it has a very difficult time even agreeing, internally, on how to create any such value to sell to the people..

Wow that sounds like some kind of german from the distant past, if at any time we spoke that way. Don't get me wrong! It just sounds, let's say interesting :-)

So, why is the pirate party not on the top with all the NSA turmoil? Well, basically they let slip any chance to exploit the topic for their benefit slip. They used to have an pretty good start with a not too weak stand at first. But then leadership and politics within the party started and the whole thing basically just started to crumble. They might have gotten over it with their new party lead, though I feel that girl just screams too much; at least their leadership and inner politics have subsided (or thats what you get as a bystander).

The whole NSA stuff has come up over the recent weeks and basically intensified--but that might be my biased reading as well--and the pirate party has not made any visible attempt to get hold of the issue, make statements, propose solution, ... nothing.

So what does the pirate party stand for? I'm not quite sure. At least I don't feel like they are the ones who would ensure that the NSA spying would get thoroughly investigated as well as the general surveillance that is happening all over the place.

Neither seems any other party to be particularly interested in handling that topic. The two big parties CDU/CSU and SPD have their focus on other things. FDP seems to see a popular interest in the NSA/spying/surveillance, and tries to position itself. Though with the FDP this is always a gamble. Maybe they /really/ /really/ want to do something, but just can't because they are always forces in a coalition? Or maybe they didn't want to fix that in the first place, but pay lip service? DIE LINKE, well I don't really know what to say about them. One thing though, their Gregor Gysi is a hell of a skilled speaker.

EDIT: Completely forgot about the Green party; they do seem to be interested in tackling the problem, though it's just not their core competence.

Bottom line, I find it hard to single out a party that would truly attack the privacy issue.

EDIT: Thinking about it, it's probably the imperative form leading into the sentence. If we reword it a little, it gets a lot better: Eine Frage an die Deutschen: warum haben die Piraten so wenig Erfolg? In Bezug auf die NSA Affäre, usw., meine ich.

Because the Pirates are disorganized internally and didn't make good use of the NSA scandal. Their biggest problem is their self-proclaimed IT-know-how which on average in the party is at best only slightly better than in other partys.

I've got friends involved in the Piratenpartei and i shudder thinking about their internal discussions. At least their mailinglists and recordings are public... Which is good in one way, but doesnt really help them win votes.

Demographics.

When the Green Party emerged in the early 1980s, they made it into the Bundestag pretty quickly because they could draw votes from a large base of young voters (the babyboomers). Nowadays young voters are a tiny fringe group so their votes hardly make a dent. That makes it more difficult than it used to be for a party representing (more or a less) their generation to cross the 5% hurdle.

The U18 vote which was carried out yesterday resulted in 12% for the Pirate Party: http://www.u18.org/das-projekt-u18/

Cynically speaking, the situation may look brighter for the Pirate Party in 4 years when more pensioners are dead.

Because they are really bad politicians. It is as simple as that, they are constantly fighting with themself so nobody is listening to them anymore.

They basicly did suicide.

After some successes in state parliaments, some nationwide leading members have been acting pretty unprofessional (i.e. immature and just plain weird) on TV during the past two or so years.

Edit: This is what I hear from tech folks. Other people just don't get what Piraten stand for. You can see that from the other replies as well. They appear very contradictory publicly. It can be argued that this is part of their concept, but people do not seem to get that.

I think there are a lot of people nowadays who care about privacy and all these NSA related topics, but in the end there are far more people who actually don't care. Maybe they don't understand, maybe they are just too lazy.

greetings from austria

(translation: why aren't the Pirates more popular after the recent events regarding the NSA etc)

my personal opinion: people don't really care that much about privacy and like "strong leaders"