Píratar — The Icelandic Pirate Party
BY FRANZ WALTENBERGER
Píratar was founded in November 2012 in Reykjavík. The party was founded in the extended aftermath of the global financial crisis in 2008, which had been financially disastrous for Iceland. Traditionally, politics and business are strongly intertwined in Iceland, a fact that was considered one of the main reasons for Iceland suffering catastrophic consequences from the crisis. In a response to this, Píratar was founded on the ideas of openness and transparency. The party uses an online voting and discussion platform to create policy proposals. The platform can be found at x.piratar.is. Less than one year after its foundation, the party managed to obtain 5.1% of total votes in the 2013 parliamentary elections. In the last elections in 2017, the Pirates received 9.2% of the vote. Notable figures in the party’s history are first president Birgitta Jónsdóttir, former WikiLeaks spokeswoman as well as Smári McCarthy, managing director of the Icelandic Initiative on Modern Media (IMMI) and Herbert Snorrason, a former OpenLeaks spokesman. The party currently has about 2700 members, which represents almost 1% of the Icelandic population.
The most important tool for all pirate party members is the online platform. Here, new policy proposals are published and can be commented and voted on by members. The platform also serves to facilitate internal elections as well as organization. Any person can visit the website and check for the latest proposals, their status and search through all older proposals. This radical openness makes it much harder for the party to engage in backroom deals, as proposals always will be published and must also be defended in public.
While the party’s open and transparent approach yielded them an impressive 5.2% after less than a year of its existence, its voter share has been fluctuating strongly over the years. The party managed to obtain international recognition when in 2015 some polls for the upcoming election had seen the party at over 40%, but ultimately failed to uphold its popularity resulting in a still respectable, albeit much lower result of 14.5% in the elections. This can likely be attributed to the ongoing quick recovery of the Icelandic economy and the unwillingness of much of the population to possibly endanger this success by voting for a radically new approach. When in 2017 a new government scandal broke loose and new elections were held, the party dropped to 9.2%. In recent years also former well-known party members have withdrawn their support, the most prominent example being Birgitta Jónsdóttir. The former president of the pirates cited the powerlessness of
the parliamentarians against the bureaucracy as one of her main reasons to leave.
In conclusion it can be stated that Píratar is probably one of the most successful grassroot democratic movements of the past decade. After a strong initial wave of success, the party recently had to deal with the withdrawal of some founding members and a declining voter share, problems that could be attributed to traditional growing pains of a still young political movement. On the other hand, these issues also might be an indicator for problems that all grassroot democratic movements are going to face at some point. Does the general population during economically comfortable times even see a need for broader public participation? Or is the popularity of these movements limited to the times of crisis?
The future of Píratar will tell us.
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