International Vote Like A Pirate Day

After their breakthrough success in the 2009 European elections, where they won two seats in Sweden’s delegation to the Parliament in Strasbourg, the world was awakened to the existence of the Pirate Party movement. In 2011, Germany’s Pirates capitalised on disaffection among Green, Free Democrat, and Left Party voters to win fifteen seats in Berlin’s state legislature. The Pirates have proved that those results were not one-off flukes, and have in the last six weeks won seats in two more state legislatures: four in Saarland and six in Schleswig-Holstein. Tonight, the country’s largest state, North Rhine-Westphalia, goes to the polls, and the Pirates are consistently polling above the five-percent threshold needed to win seats there.

Germany’s political system is fairly easy to understand. There are two main parties: the centre-right Christian Democrats (including their Bavarian arm, the Christian Social Union) and the centre-left Social Democrats, and three smaller ones: the (classical liberal) Free Democrats, the Greens, and the Left Party (a merger of East Germany’s former ruling party with some leftist groups in the west). The position of the Pirate Party, both on the left-right spectrum and in relation to the existing parties, is not yet fully clear. Commentators have difficulty placing the party on the left-right axis because their basic raison d’être confounds peoples’ identification of the left with economic interventionism and of the right with free markets. A party which attacks monopolistic corporations would appear to be left-wing, yet the Pirates also defend free enterprise. But as we shall see, the Pirates are an echo of how the German left might otherwise have developed.

The Pirates’ voter base indicates their status as a party of the left. In Berlin last year, their voters were disproportionately young, unemployed or blue-collar, and switched to the Pirates from the SPD, the Greens, the Left Party, or from not voting in the previous election. Geographically, their support was highest in working-class suburbs in West Berlin (such as the SPD-voting Spandau) or in East Berlin (such as the Left Party-voting Marzahn-Hellersdorf), and in proletarian bohemian strongholds in the city centre (such as the Green/Left Party Kreuzberg). The classical liberal/centrist FDP, who suffered a huge drop in support, mostly leaked votes to the CDU and the Greens, not to the Pirates – their base (mostly middle-class Protestants: they’re referred to as ‘the party of doctors and dentists’) aren’t the sort of people who instinctively oppose the recording industry’s War On File-Sharing. In short, the Pirates’ support is found among young, anti-system Germans who believe that the SPD and the Greens sold out to the establishment long ago, and that the Left Party is too dominated by septuagenarian ex-Stasi types to provide a dynamic alternative to the Big Four parties.

The idea that being left-wing automatically means favouring large, soulless, impersonal bureaucracies over the dynamism of the free market is a) not true of everyone on the left and b) never was true prior to the early twentieth century. The German experience is instructive in this regard. In 1891, the Social Democratic Party published its Erfurt Program, summarising its policy goals. It was produced against the backdrop of the creation of a rudimentary welfare state by Bismarck’s conservative government, which the SPD labelled ‘state socialism’ (and they meant that term to be derogatory). Its demands included biennial parliaments, the right to keep and bear arms, and an elective judiciary, in addition to a few basic calls for economic regulation, such as a forty-hour week, the abolition of child labour, and free health care. These were too much, however, for Friedreich Engels, whose critique of the program asked whether the regulation of such things as “the bar…medical services…pharmaceutics, dentistry, midwifery, nursing, etc.” was “compatible with the rejection of all state socialism.”

What happened, then, to the left-libertarian spirit of the fin-de-siècle SPD? It died when the party jettisoned its anti-war and anti-imperialist stance in the face of the patriotic mobilisation which accompanied the First World War. It embraced the statist ideas of British Fabian intellectuals, and like so many left-wing parties around the world, came to view the wartime regulation of the economy as a model for building socialism in peacetime. When the Keynesian Consensus collapsed, it followed the rest of the global establishment left in diverting its authoritarian instincts towards the nanny state and green Malthusianism. The 5-10% of left-wing Germans who now reject the SPD-Green bloc are doing exactly the same thing that SPD voters did a century ago: supporting left-libertarianism against Bismarckian state socialism. It isn’t too difficult to make the case that if Marx and Engels were alive today, they would be among them.

So to the good folk of Nordrhein-Westfalen: vote Pirate!