#ppse

Fast forward 3 years, and the roles of the two biggest Pirate Parties are reserved. Ever since 2009, Piratpartiet did not get more than 1% in any election it took place, while Piratenpartei, gaining 2% of the votes for the Bundestag election, also in 2009, was usually in this range until the 2011 Berlin state parliament election, where they turned politic reality upside down in Germany, winning 8.9% of the vote.

Even though most of the media as well as most of the politicians from other parties claimed that this was most likely due to Berlin being a special case (Urban, lots of people who 'do stuff with media' for a living, lots of hipsters, the Greens having a particularly plain and boring election campaign) Piratenpartei was able to get 7.4% in the subsequent Saarland state parliament election, and is now poised to also make it into the North-Rhine-Westfalian and Schleswig-Holsteinian state parliaments, if poll numbers are to be believed. Saarland is a totally different place than Berlin, often seen as rural and boring (even though, as Berlin, it usually votes more for left-wing parties than the rest of the Western German states).

How come Piratenpartei is now in the limelight of political attention in Germany, while Piratpartier slipped back into invisibility (at least if you go by polls)? I think this is down to a discussion within Piratenpartei in 2010: Should the party stick with what they know well, concentrating on IT topics like privacy on the Internet or copyright reform? Or should it try to get a broader footing. Since there is a 5% threshold to enter parliaments in Germany on the state (Bundesland) and national (Bundestag) levels, it was decided that a political needed to try to find answers to other pressing topics if it was to scare the other parties into changing their political programme more to our liking.

I think that, for now, this is the most striking difference between PPSE and PPDE. The German pirates subsequently tried to develop a new approach to politics based on which positions to a much broader array of topics could be developed. This mainly started on the local levels, and in municipal elections between 2009 and 1011 PPDE did remarkably well in some urban places, which resulted in know-how in political campaigning as well as a bigger number of citizens becoming aware of the party, its aims, and, most importantly, the individuals that stand behind the party.