Members of the Pirate Party attended a conference in Neumünster, Germany, last month.
By NICHOLAS KULISH
I FIRST took real notice of the Pirates last summer during the campaign for city elections in Berlin. German electioneering is quaint, even faintly musty by American standards. Political advertising mostly takes the form of full-color head shots of the candidates hung on light posts and telephone poles with interchangeable slogans about working for a brighter future.
“Why am I hanging here anyway?” a Pirate Party poster brazenly asked, the unshaven face in black and white, belonging to the candidate Christopher Lauer, neither smiling nor making the requisite eye contact. “You’re not going to vote anyway.”
When the Pirates captured a surprising 9 percent of the vote, I ventured out to their election-night party at a scruffy club in the traditional counterculture neighborhood of Kreuzberg. “We’re a chaotic band of cyber-hippies,” said Oliver Höfinghoff, an army veteran who had served two tours in Kosovo and was about to start his first in the city legislature. “And we should stay that way.”
Though the Pirates are mostly known as a one-issue party advocating Internet freedom, Mr. Höfinghoff explained their online decision-making system, Liquid Feedback. Every subject could be debated, drafted, amended and voted on by members over the Internet. The process was the platform.
The idea of electing someone as your proxy for two, four or even six long years may have been a necessity in the days of the American Constitutional Convention, when representatives rode to the capital by horseback. Some people who vote dozens of times a day on their favorite videos, articles and songs say it’s outdated.
The Pirate Party was founded in Sweden by the former software entrepreneur Rick Falkvinge on Jan. 1, 2006, to reform copyright and patent law and to strengthen online privacy. The party’s profile rose after Swedish police officers raided the popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay that May. By September of that year a German branch had formed. Six years later Mr. Falkvinge claims there are more than 50 Pirate Parties worldwide.
“Written language allowed people to communicate over time, the printing press to reach people en masse,” Mr. Falkvinge told me at the election party in Berlin. “The Internet turned passive receivers into an active community.”
Germany has had its own outposts of the Occupy movement, most notably in Frankfurt and Berlin, but the country’s political preoccupation has been the organized challenge within the system that is the Pirate Party.
“We Germans were never the greatest revolutionaries,” said Marc Olejak, a 40-year-old candidate out campaigning recently in Düsseldorf, capital of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where elections are coming up later in the month. “Instead of burning barricades, we go out and found political parties.” The Pirates are expected to win just under 10 percent in the state, Germany’s most populous, which would make Mr. Olejak, with his chin-strap beard and long black corduroy jacket, a state legislator.
A recent survey found that nearly one in three Germans would in principle be willing to vote for the Pirates; they even nosed ahead of the Green Party in several opinion surveys as Germany’s third most popular party. The Greens were once the insurgent activists on the political scene. Now founding members from the ’68 generation have started collecting their pensions. A Green campaign poster with a cursor arrow pointing at a Facebook thumbs-up icon carried a whiff of desperation to keep up with the Pirates.
PIRATE PARTY supporters are younger and savvier about the Internet, a mix of first-time voters and disenchanted members from all the other parties. In addition to the lefties, there are a fair number of traditional libertarians. While the Greens tried to burnish their online bona fides with Facebook icons, the Pirates put up signs that said: “We obey the Constitution. In that we’re conservative.” In Düsseldorf they were handing out free copies of the German Constitution, known as the Grundgesetz.
There have been growing pains, notably when the party’s floor leader in the Berlin city Parliament, Martin Delius, told Der Spiegel last month that “the rise of the Pirate Party is as fast as that of the N.S.D.A.P.” — the Nazi Party — “between 1928 and 1933.”
These are not the sort of comments that instill confidence in a political establishment already deeply mistrustful of the newcomers, with their World of Warcraft references and ever-present bottles of Club-Mate, something like a German herbal Red Bull popular among hackers and at techno clubs.
The Nazi comparison was particularly ill-timed because several Pirate members’ far-right sympathies had recently come to light, leading to a nationwide debate over whether the party’s breakneck growth — official membership has more than doubled, to over 29,000, since the Berlin vote in September — has swept too many radical fringe elements into the group.
When I met Mr. Olejak at the campaign event, he was about to watch the original Swedish version of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” on his Toshiba laptop in the pedestrian zone in downtown Düsseldorf. The event was a symbolic stand against laws barring public screenings of copyrighted material.
A bright orange sofa — orange is the official color of the Pirates — had been wheeled in for the occasion, hitched to a bicycle like a boat to the back of a pickup truck. The local party treasurer was wearing orange laces in his black Chuck Taylors and watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on his Apple MacBook. Frank Capra’s political classic “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” would have been altogether too fitting.
Though Mr. Olejak is a professional typesetter, he said the typeface for their signs had been selected by online committee, the decisions made by “the graphics hive.” One of his companions described wading through reams of legislation and legal commentary to make himself a copyright expert.
These are the people who read those long privacy notices the rest of us guiltily click “O.K.” on and try to forget about as we post intimate photos of family and friends on a Web site intended to earn a profit for a corporation. For them, politics, with its thousand-page pieces of legislation, is really the fine print of the social contract.
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