Copyright protesting Pirate party may win 9% in local elections in Berlin

Update: Preliminary results with 99% of the votes counted give the Pirate Party 8.9% which is above the 5% required to win seats.

Al Jazzera reports that Merkle's CDU is headed for a sixth straight defeat in local elections in Germany. Hardly a surprise given the mess that the Euro is in. Germany is far from blameless in the Euro mess, they never imagined that there might be a point where inflation might be the least worse policy option for Europe as a whole.

But what really caught my eye was the fact that the 'Pirate party' is polling at 9%. Its a protest party certainly, but it isn't the only protest option and 9% is a very large protest vote.

The Pirate party began in Sweden as a one-issue party formed around copyright reform. Like many fringe parties, there were plenty of people associated with it who could fairly be regarded as 'fringe' or 'flakes'.

Twenty years ago the Green party was in a similar situation. One of my friends at Oxford was Mike Woodin, who later went on to become Principal Speaker of the party. Mike was 'mad as a box of frogs' as one of the Tories put it. But twenty years later I live in a city that has just introduced a single stream recycling program, incandescent bulbs are being phased out and electric and hybrid cars may well become mainstream. There is already one wind turbine in the city and they are just building a second. When the price drops I will probably install solar. It is hard to know if the Green party was a cause or a consequence of the shift towards environmental thinking, but it did at the very least coincide with the change in attitudes.

I am pretty sure that the Pirate party program is not sustainable. If people want to watch blockbuster movies costing $100 million or more to make, somehow the producers have to be making at least $101 million back. But the rise of the Pirate party suggests that the continuous erosion of the public domain commons is not sustainable either.