EU elections, seaborne scoundrels and an indeterminate waypoint @2009-06-08 18:42:15As some of you undoubtedly will know, yesterday was the day of the EU parliamentary elections (and also some communal elections of neglectable importance in Germany, but let's not go there). Of quite natural interest to me was the performance of the various Pirate Parties we have in the EU now (though I'm still not sure if the Finns were able to run in the end) and I wound up spending most of the evening following, with a certain sense of excitement that I'm quite surprised I could even muster for something like politics, the local results flying in one by one.
Not at all surprisingly, the German Pirate Party performed best in the larger cities (and wherever broadband internet is available, one might argue), even achieving results like a 1.92% in Dresden (my current constituency), placing first among all the "minor" parties and sixth in the grand total) and the east, where a certain percentage of "protest voters" and people placing their cross next to whatever sounds most funny to them exists and the CDU/CSU mantrain isn't that developed. In the grand total, after heavy downbound drag especially by the rural areas of Southern Bavaria, this amounted to 220thousandandsomething votes or a rounded up 0.9%, which is a pretty surprisingly high figure for a country like Germany where the average citizen still groups everything internet into the "child's play" box. (Note how inane spam like the "Animal protection party" managed to score higher.)
When the first estimates arrived, it actually looked like both the Conservatives and the Greens were on the losing side - but you can't have everything at once, of course, so while the Conservatives wound up losing some 6-7 percent, the Green Party actually was one of the slight profiteers of the election. On the brighter side, the largest absolute gain in votes was scored by the Liberals, whose EU-level politics, unlike their federal ones, made a fairly positive impression on me so far.
The really interesting battlefield of this round, however, were the 18+2 seats that are assigned to Sweden (or should be completely once/if the Lissabon Treaty is enacted, which looks all the more likely now because the Irish got scared of going bankrupt all alone, but let's not go there). Slightly below the more optimistic prognoses, though, the 7.1% victory of the Swedes still feels almost unreal considering the circumstances and the general tone on their topics in the spheres they have set out for. From all I gather, this seems to mean one seat for them and another once the two additional seats kept back for the Lissabon treaty's enactment are enabled. While it is unclear whether they will join ALDE or the Greens-EFA yet (I'd hope for the former, but it's unclear whether they would be able to skew the position of their "enterprise-friendly" undercurrent in the copyright matter with just one and a half person...), I frankly don't expect much of a direct impact from this yet (though I'm still looking forward to disappointed and outright outraged reactions to the result from the copyright lobby) - the right signals, however, have been sent. Let's hope this was a starting point rather than a zenith reached by a unique series of mistakes by the opponents.
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