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Comment by NonEUCitizen | Hacker News Reader

Has there been polling as to whether support for German Pirate Party has increased?

Probably not because our Pirate Party is only known for drama and the media portrays them as an disorganized bunch of kids who fight over internal power.

Not that the media would be particularly wrong with this. When the party was founded I had some hopes ... now I have given up on them.

That reads like you have simply bought in to the media smearing. Sound familiar?

See here in the UK, our media represent the whole of the EU like that.

Don't give up, get involved.

> That reads like you have simply bought in to the media smearing. Sound familiar?

I wish it was just that. But you don't need the media to get the full drama experience. Their twitter flame wars are famous and the fall-out from certain actions (like devastating a congress centre and blowing up the bill to over 20k eur where initially 1700 eur were planned as expenses) can be read in their official wikis.

I was a member in the SPD party (some of the bigger German parties) some years ago and quit shortly after becoming a member because it was all about internal power struggles - even with a local 'branch' in a 30k pop town. I decided politics wasn't for me. I had better things to do than wasting them on bullshit.

Then after I got invited by a friend to come along to one of their meetings (for a 250k pop city) I decided to give politics a second chance. And I swear - it was the same like what I had experienced before with the SPD. Only there were significantly more mobile computing devices around. It was 90% about administration (who and how should do what and why that someone was a bad choice mixed in with some feminism/sexism debate) and the real issues (data retention, privacy, etc) weren't even discussed.

In politics I think there are many people who do care about the core issues - but there are far too many egomaniac assholes around destroying every constructive discussion with their bullshit. And after what I've seen I don't believe that the pirate party is immune to that.

Unfortunately it is not just media smear. In Germany we have at the moment roughly ten percent of the electorate who are deeply future shocked and are just random walking around the political landscape. ( They did push the FDP to 14% in the last parliament election, pushed the Greens to win the Baden Wuerttemberg election and voted the Berlin Pirates to 13% two years ago. ) And some of these guys did overrun the original pirate party.

For example, they did recreate a lot of the problems voting machines have with their 'liquid feedback' system, and when called out on that answered that they do not know, but since 1337 pirate party instead of evil(TM) Diebold suggested it, there is surely a way. ( And to rant a bit, at their last party convention they did petition that the parliament publishes their schedule on the INTERNET, which the parliament of course does. But there is no one left in the pirates who is able to google.)

So by now I tend to think of the German pirate party as the party of cargo cult modern, in the sense that modern does not mean a opinion informed by deep technical understanding, but modern in the sense of the latest Techcrunsh fad, independent if that is Instagram, Stasibook or Anonymous.

No, the pirate party in Germany is a fucking mess. Unelectable. (This opinion is based on reading the parties’ own writing and discussions, not on anything the media wrote.)

A foreginer here. Would you like to elaborate why they seem unelectable?

They are unable to settle on a real party manifesto. Also they have problems to organize themselves. Even worse, they regularly contradict each other in public. (My personal view)

It's not so strange, because the core issues of the pirate parties are orthogonal to the classical left-right spectrum.

They're trying to form a party out of a fraction of a full platform, with the result that they will either need to find a way to agree to disagree about large swathes of politics, or they will drive away large parts of their potential supporters.

Don't read the mailing lists, they're public and thus a trollfest. I was also somewhat disillusioned in the recent months, but that is over now. I went out setting up campaign advertisement signs in 2009 and I'm doing it again this year.

This is our only chance. Remember, even though some of the Berlin scene wish to "reboot" the Pirate Party in a way that is more to their liking, it is far too late for that. The Pirate Party has seats in west German state parliaments, which is a lot more valuable as a gauge for the chance of success than what the blogosphere thinks. If we fail now, after having come so far, then the project is eternally burned. We are at 2-3 % and the party is well beyond 10000 members. This is the window of opportunity to make a difference.

Here you go http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm. (Click on the headings for results of previous weeks for a specific pollster.) Piraten are fairly stable around 3%.

I think these polling results are not very meaningful in regard to the Pirate party. At the last election only one pollster saw them at 1% all the others at NA [1]. In the end they won 2.0 %.

Pollsters still rely primarily on land line telephone interviews, and Pirate voters are therefore heavily underrepresented. Of course pollster know that and try to compensate for this effect but as long as they don't change the sampling method the error for the Pirates will be large. Peter Norvig's FAQ about the U.S. Presidential Election [2] has some excellent explanations of these effects.

[1] http://www.bundestagswahl-2009.de/wahlumfragen/

[2] http://norvig.com/election-faq-2012.html

They don't get the media attention (if they are doing something at all). My biggest fear is that the Liberals (FDP) gain votes through this...

Why would the FDP profit from this? AFAIK they never positioned themselves in favor of privacy.

I think the green party (Bündnis 90 / Die Grüne) will profit considerably more from this. They are know promoters of privacy and personal rights. "Die Linke" could also profit from this.

Of course they did. They made their position against the Vorratsdatenspeicherung several times in the last years (See their statement here: http://www.fdp-fraktion.de/Vorratsdatenspeicherung-nicht-bes... ).

With Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger they also have the last privacy wall before the Constitutional Court.

They of course have absolutly no problems with corporate data mining...

The liberals are very vocal about privacy and interfering of the state in the people's affairs. They just don't do a very good job making people aware of these positions...

Or fighting for those positions.

Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger has been pretty consistent, though.

If it weren't for their neo-liberal/laissez-faire approach to economics, I'd consider voting for them...

SLS usually does. But to me it always seems like she is rather alone in her party. And even she had some slip ups. If the FDP were a liberal party they'd never ally with the CDU as they are probably the most anti-liberal party we have.

> "Die Linke" could also profit from this.

That would be a bit ironic, given that Die Linke includes former PDS.

(for those not following German politics: PDS was "Party for Democratic Socialism", formed from the remains of the old "SED" - Socialist Unity Party, better known as the ruling party of DDR and originators of Stasi)

They already made posters with the title abolish intelligence agencies.

I find it hard to believe them, though. They seem to be against anything as soon as it gets unpopular.

Perhaps one should translate to American: The Greens are the liberals in German politics, the FDP is the free market party, which results in a mix of libertarian and crony capitalist politics. (Similar to the pro business wing of the republicans.)

I would not call the FDP a free market party. Crony/lobby capitalsim yes, free markets...no

"Free markets" is the American term for businesses can do what they want, the middle and lower classes foot the bill.

Here is some useful info to avoid this from happening: Whenever it comes up in conversation that the FDP might be a viable alternative, tell people that an FDP man acted as a mole for the US during the last coalition negotiations[1]. The party leadership made him a lone gunman, but hey had to be pushed by their base to ostracize him.

Also, if, during coalition negotiations, there is a choice between more privacy for everybody or Westerwelle retaining his post as Minister of Foreign Affairs, what will they chose? Bringing up that question is usually sufficient to get people to distance themselves from the thought of voting for the FDP.

[1] http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

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