I'm from germany, and have voted for the pirate party in recent local elections.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>It's by no means guaranteed, but they seem to be on the way of becoming a serious political force in germany.
Politics in Germany are really interesting these days. Even if the Pirate Party should fail in the end, the discussion it brought up is already very beneficial.
This is good news. But I am not sure yet if I would vote for them (usually I do not vote). Their economic policy seems not mature enough or too much towards an even more socialist State. This is what is now failing us in most of the western Europe.<p>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.
This has nothing to do with their politics, it is simply the fact that they offer an alternative, people will vote for them because they don't feel represented by the other parties.<p>They are new, they are cool, they have an "anti-authoritarian" vibe, they will achieve nothing and be forgotten in a couple of years.<p>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 :)<p>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
Quite interesting is also their approach to finding positions via voting on an open online platform (which is open sourced by the way: <a href="http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback" rel="nofollow">http://www.public-software-group.org/liquid_feedback</a> ) where each member can vote itself and also delegate its vote for different topics to other members.
I really wish I was in Europe now to participate more in this. If you ever wanted to get info politics (even only a little bit), now is the perfect time. Next elections into the Bundestag and four years later into the gov't. And in ten years the European commissioner for IT things will be a Pirate, harrr harrr!
just for remembrance (don't read the title misleadingly): this ist <i>just</i> a poll!<p>edit: some more information: <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,826540,00.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,826540,00...</a>
I wonder why the photo says "Nerz Attends". His name is Sebastian Nerz. My guess is that somebody chose the first two words from a random sentence (i.e. "Nerz attends the general assembly") and tagged the photo with that as a name.