Or: why it does make sense to vote for the pirate party even if they don’t get 5%

This posting is mainly for people who …

• … want to know more about the German election system
• … find the pirate party interesting, but don’t think it’s very smart to vote for a party which most probably won’t make it into parliament

Two weeks ago I wrote that I find it highly unlikely that the pirate party will make it into the German parliament after the elections, as they will not be able to receive the 5% of the votes that are needed.

This is not entirely true, due to the fairly complicated election system is Germany.

I’ll try to shortly sum up the German election system, and then come to my conclusion – skip the introduction if you’re familiar with the system.

When we go voting on the 27th of September, we have a first vote and a second vote.
With the first vote, we vote for a politician in our region, with the second for a party.
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When I was a child, I was always surrounded by police officers.

Not because I grew up in prison, but because my father was working for the state. We lived in an apartment building with many other families of civil servants, and out the five neighbours in our part of the block, three were police-families, all with at least two children.

The policemen were funny and caring people, and as a child, I liked them very much. And I still do. They often had to go away on “missions”, sometimes being unable to tell their families when they would be back. And we would throw a garden party upon their return.

I remember one time when they all suddenly had to go away in the late evening, leaving their wives and children worried. They later told us that they had to search a forest all night for the body of a child.

Now, there are many groups of people – police is one, teachers another, priests a third, and so on. Due to the fact that every group of people consists of people, you will always find a certain percentage with anti-social tendencies, no matter where you look.

For two reasons, I have always had a blind spot regarding policemen, and I already pointed out the first one – I grew up with them, and they were decent people; I even worked with the Bavarian police force for a couple of month during my studies. The second reason is that I met many left radicals on demonstrations (e.g. on the 1st of May demonstrations in Leipzig), who just saw it as a sport to throw rocks at the police. I saw a lot of them being treated rather roughly (and I imagine some of them were trying to sue the police afterwards), but in my opinion it was always correct behavior because it was without exaggerated brutality, and usually after aggressive acts which led or may have led to serious injuries of police officers.

Therefor, for the last years, I didn’t take the reports of unchecked police aggression very serious. And this might have been a wrong thing to do.

Three days ago I was one of 25.000 participants of the demonstration “Freiheit statt Angst” (freedom instead of fear) in Berlin. It was awesome to see so many people protesting – young and old people, supporters of very different political parties, and only very few left radicals. It was a peaceful demonstration, until the police started to make trouble.

Watch seconds 36 to 38 carefully. You can also find the video here in high resolution (250mb).

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Alexander Lehmann hat nach Du bist Terrorist ein zweites Video herausgebracht.

Bitte nehmt euch die Zeit, euch dieses Video anzusehen, gerade im Kontext der bevorstehenden Wahlen, und versucht das auch denjenigen weiterzuleiten, die sich nicht so gut im Bereich IT, Grundrechte und Datenschutz auskennen.

It has become more and more popular in the last years to take something someone else has made, and re-use it somehow. Some people consider this art (I won’t go into this discussion here). Some people call it remixing.

You’ll find the remix-generator I’m talking about in this entry here.

The first remix-contest of Netzpolitik.org took place in August, and had far over 1.000 submissions. People were asked to make a better use of the following Schäuble campaign poster:

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The Wahlomat for the election in September just went online.

Malte Welding, der für die Netzzeitung schreibt, hat einige Blogger, darunter auch mich, im Laufe der letzten Tage um eine kurze Einschätzung in Bezug auf die Piratenpartei gebeten. Der Artikel ist vor ein paar Stunden online gegangen und hier zu finden.

Da ich mich in den letzten Monaten recht intensiv mit der Partei auseinandergesetzt habe, möchte ich die Gelegenheit nutzen, meine Position hier noch etwas detaillierter darzustellen.

Der folgende Artikel erhält meine Einschätzung der (1) Erfolgsaussichten und (2) Wählbarkeit der Piratenpartei sowie (3) die Frage, ob Piraten-Wählen der Union hilft. Ich freue mich sehr auf eure Sicht der Dinge.

(1) Erfolgsaussichten
Zuerst einmal muss klargestellt werden, dass das erklärte Ziel der Piraten in Deutschland ein Prozent der Stimmen ist. Das ist kein unehrgeiziges Ziel für eine Partei, die zum ersten Mal bei einer Bundestagswahl antritt. Meiner Einschätzung nach werden sie ihr Ziel erreichen können, aber nicht weit darüber hinaus kommen. Deswegen ist es auch wichtig, sie nach der Wahl an dem einen Prozent zu messen, und nicht an den fünf, die von anderen ins Spiel gebracht wurden. Alle “Sonstigen” Parteien zusammen haben bei der Bundestagswahl 2005 3.9% der Stimmen erreicht, die Grünen 8.1% – das als Vergleichsmarke dafür, wie utopisch 5% sind.

Um das Ziel der Piraten zu erreichen, brauchen sie also knapp über eine halbe Million Stimmen (bei ca. 63 Millionen Wahlberechtigten und einer geschätzten Wahlbeteiligung von 80% – 2005 lag sie bei 77.7%).
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(1) On the 30th of August, the election in the German state “Saarland” will take place. As it looks like at the moment, it will be quite a close call. Considering this, it’s very interesting to look at the design of the ballot:

(2) Angela Merkel explains the tax-concept of her party in 90 seconds:

(3) Fefe sent a petition to the German Bundestag requesting a three-strike-rule: as soon as a delegate votes for the third anticonstitutional bill (s)he should lose his/her seat in the Bundestag.
The petition was declined – delegates are only “indebted to their conscience”, as the German constitution states. Which is, of course, ludicrous: common practice in the German Bundestag is using so-called whips for elections, meaning that every delegate of a specific party X has to vote the way the party X decided they have to.
So much for conscience. For some more thoughs on this topic, check out Malte.

(4) The German conservatives are so afraid by the Pirate Party that they actually started abusing their financial superiority and pasted over Pirate Party election posters with conservative ones.

(5) The conservatives gave a small election party where local media were invited. When a team of the magazine Spiegel turned up, they were not let in, and after they got in, they were thrown out by Zensursula herself!
The video is hilarious, watch it!

(Sources: spiegel.de, malte welding, fefe, spitblog.de)

OpenBC/Xing thought it would be a great idea to allow German parties to open an account for the big election in September 2009 – however, they only gave this permission to 5 parties. Now, the pirate party not being available, people who wanted to give their support to the pirates had to vote for “others” (German: “Sonstige”, the last grey column).

And they did. Keep in mind that this vote was taken by over 12.000 users so far.

(via Fefe)

As you probably now, a bill was passed in Germany some weeks ago introducing internet censorship. Officially – the same argument as in China, by the way – to fight child pornography.

People who actually know things about law and know things about the internet agree though that this won’t help a bit, provides the state with undemocratic instruments of censorship (since the list can’t be looked into or controlled), and was just done because the big elections will be held in September; it’s easy to mobilize people who have no idea about the internet talking about child pornography, you know … especially when you’re conservative, and 80% of your voters are seniors.

Now, something very weird has happened – and the bill will probably not come into effect.
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