Pirates Take A Seat

An irreverent campaign that focused on file-sharing, data protection and censorship appears to have paid off for the Pirate party, which has won a seat in Berlin’s state parliament.

Exit polls suggested the pirates had secured 8.5 percent of the vote, enough to take a seat from the Free Democrats, German Premier Angela Merkel’s junior partner in the unpopular national government.

The Pirate party, which was founded in 2006, is “in tune with the Berlin vibe with their relaxed campaign,” Holger Liljeberg of the Info polling institute told Reuters. “They focus a lot on liberalism, freedom and self-determination.”

The result is not the first European success for the Pirates.

The original Swedish version of the party won a seat in the European parliament in 2009 after capturing just over 7 percent of the vote.
Support for the party had soared after the jailing of the four founders of the Pirate Bay file-sharing site.