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A Numbers Game<br />
Interview with Richard Falkvinge,<br />
President of the Pirate Party<br />
Stockholm, 27 th of June 2007, Espresso Café<br />
Hello Richard, and thanks for having<br />
time for this conversation. Can you briefly<br />
explain why Pirate Party emerged, and<br />
what made you to register as a formal<br />
political entity?<br />
What we realized was basically that there<br />
is no incentive at all for politicians to understand<br />
what’s going on right now in the<br />
economy, what is going on with civil liberties<br />
in terms of the copyright debate. They are so<br />
tied up with their school, health care, taxation,<br />
work force and so on and so forth that<br />
there is no time or no interest in understanding<br />
these issues. So, we realized that the<br />
worst penalty for them was, if they made the<br />
wrong decision, that maybe someone out in<br />
the back quarters, in the shades somewhere,<br />
without any influence whatsoever, might<br />
get upset. So what we needed to do was to<br />
raise the stakes, was to send a message to the<br />
politicians that if you don’t understand these<br />
issues, if you don’t take your time to understand<br />
them right now, then you risk being<br />
out of your job after the elections...<br />
After only three months of preparation<br />
it seems that elections proved you have<br />
been right, as some immediate results<br />
were achieved. How would you judge<br />
the impact Pirate Party had so far on the<br />
political life of Sweden?<br />
76<br />
We fought our way into the top ten list of<br />
parties and into the proportional representation<br />
of parties, and I think this is very good<br />
even though we didn’t reach the threshold.<br />
We influenced most of the other parties who<br />
are in parliament, and actually two parties<br />
in our neighbouring country copied our<br />
platform almost word for word and, most<br />
importantly, people are starting to see that<br />
this is actually a real issue, that this is becoming<br />
a very important issue in particular<br />
for the first time voters.<br />
It’s not only Sweden that’s got a Pirate<br />
Party in the previous year. How many<br />
Pirate Parties are there, and what’s your<br />
relationship towards sister parties?<br />
It sort of depends on where do you draw the<br />
line. If a couple of guys set up a website and<br />
say they’re Pirate Party, I would say they are<br />
probably not - if I come down to a congress<br />
like I did in München with the Deutsche Piratenpartei<br />
and I see a room full of delegates,<br />
is that a Pirate Party? Yes, it is definitely! So<br />
where do you draw the line, I’m not sure.<br />
There are at least two dozen initiatives, how<br />
many have matured into a full flesh Pirate<br />
Party I’m not sure, but what we can see, and<br />
this is important, what we can see is that this<br />
is a global movement, it’s happening all over<br />
the world, in six out of seven continents.
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