The Null Device

Who are the Pirates?

p1200616.jpgMore on the Pirate Party's recent electoral success in Berlin: Der Spiegel asks who the Pirate Party are (spoiler: they're the new Greens):
Voter analysis from Sunday would seem to back up that assessment. The survey group Infratest established that 17,000 former Green Party supporters switched their votes to the Pirate Party on Sunday, more than came from any other party. The SPD lost 14,000 voters to the Pirates and the far-left Left Party 13,000.
The party's largest coup, however, came from its ability to attract fully 23,000 people to the polls who had never voted before. More votes came from former East Berlin, where the party secured 10.1 percent of the vote, than from former West Berlin. Most of the party's supporters are young, well-educated men -- as are 14 of the 15 Pirates who will now take their seats in the Berlin city-state parliament.
And a Spiegel survey of editorials from various German newspapers (conveniently annotated with their political slants) links the Pirate vote to the rise of the laptop-and-latte generation in Berlin, a city now said to be Europe's IT start-up hub. Which raises the question of whether the Pirates are a progressive party for an age of gentrification.

Meanwhile, the Grauniad asks whether something like that could happen in Britain. (Spoiler: not in a first-past-the-post system, and Britain's politicians also seem less technologically clueful, and more beholden to the old-media powerbrokers, than Germany's:)

The German government was one of the first to decide that national-security systems should not be based on proprietary software. In such a climate it's predictable that a campaigning political party with a radical online agenda would find a ready audience. The bovine way in which the last House of Commons passed Lord Mandelson's digital economy bill, with its clueless 'anti-piracy' provisions, does not exactly engender confidence in the British political class's understanding of these matters.

There are 2 comments on "Who are the Pirates?":

Posted by: unixdj http://www.wahlen-berlin.de/wahlen/BE2011/ergebn Thu Sep 22 17:28:43 2011

It's nice that Der Spiegel talks about east and west, but let's look at the boroughs breakdown (url on the left). The biggest percentage of votes, 14.7%, came from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, which is shared between former east and west. Next there's Mitte (shared) and Pankow (east), followed by Neukölln (west), Treptow-Köpenick and Lichtenberg (east). While it's true that the least votes came from former west parts, Marzahn-Hellersdorf (east) cited below average. To me the pattern is clear: the closer you are to Oberbaumbrücke, the more likely you are to vote for pirates.

Posted by: unixdj http://www.wahlen-berlin.de/wahlen/BE2011/ergebn Thu Sep 22 17:30:48 2011

It's nice that Der Spiegel talks about east and west, but let's look at the boroughs breakdown (url on the left). The biggest percentage of votes, 14.7%, came from Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, which is shared between former east and west. Next there's Mitte (shared) and Pankow (east), followed by Neukölln (west), Treptow-Köpenick and Lichtenberg (east). While it's true that the least votes came from former west parts, Marzahn-Hellersdorf (east) cited below average. To me the pattern is clear: the closer you are to Oberbaumbrücke, the more likely you are to vote for pirates.