Rick Falkvinge, pirate

Our Incredibly Important Partial Win

Friends,

Sunday, we won an incredibly important partial victory. All of us who fought hard with these questions were finally given political vindication. Christian Engström goes to Brussels. And if the Lisbon Treaty is approved in Ireland in the autumn—as we are against the thing, in and of itself—so Amelia Andersdotter also goes to Brussels.

(Previously there was information that we would send down our other, future, Representative as an observer. They proved unable to comply to our request.)

I said earlier that we would get to write history. We have done that now. Our victory has resounded throughout the world. An international news search for “Pirate Party” revealed 2459 articles—two and a half thousand articles all over the world! If we instead look at Spanish-speaking media and search for “Partido Pirata” on Monday, there were 1898 articles—just under two thousand. Even more impressive is the French-speaking media, where we have 3537 articles around the world (search term: “Parti Pirate”).

It is possible to formulate things a little differently: now there are more articles in the world press on Christian Engström (1343) than articles on Fredrik Reinfeldt (1259). Is says something about the enormous credibility we have built up—and we built this together.

All the while, Swedish media reports on international interest (Svenska Dagblet, Dagens Nyheter). On the subject of Swedish media, these were seen on newspapers’ front pages the day after the election (load images in email if you’re reading this newsletter there):

We talked a lot about a victory that was needed to get the politicians to wake up. We won this partial victory.

BBC offers this summary of the situation from a narrow perspective of file sharing: “The copyright issue has yet to become as hot a political potato in the UK as it is in Sweden, but politicians here will be be wondering who they need to appease most, the media barons or the seven million people who indulge in illegal downloading. Don’t be surprised if there’s a swing to the pirates here too.” Just as it was indeed.

Free society was at stake in this election. And we won. Free society won.

It was we who built and took home the victory. We have fifty thousand members, seventeen thousand activists, seven hundred officers and everyone who has discussed issues outside the party.

We did this together.

We are amateurs. We haven’t received one Krona in government grants. We are ordinary people who decided to make a difference. Each one of us.

Let’s take an incredibly, well-deserved rest period, before we also gear up to enter the Swedish parliament on September 19, 2010. In the meantime, our new members of Parliament to speed to Brussels with the third reading of the Telecoms package as soon as Parliament opens.

We built this together, friends and colleagues. And even though it was only a partial victory, we are from ready to secure citizens’ rights and those of an open society, so I think we should feel incredibly proud of our achievement so far.