Swedish Voters Keelhaul Pirate Party

Billosaur writes "Apparently the 'scurvy dawgs' are still in control. Results from Sunday's Swedish national election were not favorable for the Pirate Party, according to Wired News. According to the article, 'The Pirate Party not only failed to score the 4 percent required for a seat in Sweden's Parliament, but appears to have missed the 1 percent that would have afforded the party state assistance with printing ballots and funding staff in the next election.' However, the party sees this as a learning experience and morale is still good."

Comments

Re:This was not good to start with

[eldavojohn]

A political party for illegal actions? come on!

Might I remind you that the founding politicians of America were violating many English laws and guilty of leading revolts against the British Crown ... punishable by death if I'm not mistaken.

Just because a political party is advocating something currently illegal doesn't mean it's a bad idea to elect them and change that law. Especially if it's a stupid law or is detrimental to the populace.

Let the people vote.

Re:logic explained

[Per Wigren]

so wait - other than women who are beautiful (which is enough), what does sweden have thats cool?

IKEA, Volvo, Ericsson, MySQL, The Pirate Bay, ABBA and meatballs.

Re:This was not good to start with

[CastrTroy]

It probably falls under the same umbrella as the Marijuana parties that exist in certain countries.

Re:This was not good to start with

[MynockGuano]

Bleh. I modded this flamebait on accident. The mod system needs to have an undo button. :/

And it does, as you so have so aptly demonstrated. >8)

(posting in a thread that you've moderated causes all of your moderations in the thread to be wiped)

Pirate party was wildly successful!

[abelsson]

The Pirate party may not reached the Riksdag, but they have already caused ALL parties to reconsider their position on file sharing.

• The Greens just published a policy document named "Free the files" which is basically a copy of the Pirate partys program.
• The leaders of the Moderates and the Social Democrates (the two largest parties) have stated that the the much critizied law from last year that outlawed file sharing should be reconsidered.
• ALL youth leagues of all parties are pro-filesharing.

In the school elections the party got 4.5% of the votes, even without preprinted ballots. In short, the pirate party has shown that a large portion of the youth are interested in these issues, and no party can afford to alienate entire generations. So while it didn't get into parliment, the pirates did already influency policy and debate- much more than any of the other small parties.

Re:This was not good to start with

[teh_chrizzle]

sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.

Re:Larger change in Swedish politics

[Alef]

The Social Democrats just got ousted from power by a moderate coallition that is seeking to introduce some market reforms into Sweden. Gee, you think that might have something to do with a fledgling party whose property rights philosophy is probably left of the Social Democrats not getting any attention?

I wouldn't categorize the Pirate Party as a left wing party. For instance, the founder Rickard Falkvinge is a former member of Moderate Youth League the youth organization of the Swedish Moderate Party (conservative).

Besides, the election results had more to do with people wanting new faces in politics (especially the prime minister), and an incredibly lacking campaign by the Social Democrats, basically just repeating how "things are great", neglecting every concern expressed by the people and saying nothing about what they want to do in the future. At the same time, the moderates described themselves as "the new working class party" (calling themselves "the New Moderate Party") and lauded the welfare state. So people switched.