Hoist the Jolly Roger maties, the Pirate Party has claimed at least one of Sweden’s 20 seats in the European Parliament (and possibly two) as a result of thisweekend’s voting across the 27-nation bloc. The party, which ran on a platform of legalizing file-sharing and rolling back government surveillance powers, garnered 7.1% of the vote, putting it ahead of several more-established parties.
Turnout in Sweden was 43.8%, slightly ahead of the 37.1% turnout in the 2004 election, despite predictions of record low turnout heading into the weekend. TorrentFreak does the mathandestimates about 200,000 Swedes voted Pirate this time around, a nearly five-fold increase over the 35,000 votes the party garnered in the 2006 national election. The party saw a surge in membership in the wake of the conviction in April of four of the founders of The Pirate Bay, one of the largest BitTorrent tracker sites.
Apart from the immediate implications of the Pirate Party victory, the election results in general are likely to lead to some hand-wringing in EU capitals. Governing parties in about a dozen EU countries suffered defeats in the election, most notably in Britain, where Labour claimed only 16% of the vote, its lowest total in decades.
In general, small, even fringe, parties did well across the EU, including the Whites-only British National Party and far-right parties in the Netherlands, Hungary and Austria. The anti-Europe British Independence Party also scored gains. Across the bloc, right-leaning parties scored significant gains while center-left parties were generally pummelled.
Back home, the 2nd World Copyright Summit is scheduled to open in Washington, DC on Tuesday. The two-day conference is sponsored by the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC), and will feature some 500 delegates from 55 countries.
The Pirate Party victory is sure to be a topic of discussion. The full agenda is here.
And oh, yeah, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference blah, blah, blah, new iPhone, blah, blah, blah, Steve Jobs is risen, blah, blah, blah, and he is separating the righteous from the the wicked, and the righteous shall have their apps approved and the wicked shall be cast into the Palm of eternal darkness blah, blah, blah.