Published in News

Pirates get seat in EU parliament

by on08 June 2009

Image

RIAA walks the plank

The
Swedish Pirate Party has managed to win a seat in the European Parliament, showing politicians that people have had a gutsful of laws that favour the music and film industry.

The party wants to legalise Internet filesharing and beef up web privacy winning 7.1 percent of votes, taking one of Sweden's 18 seats in the European parliament, with ballots in 5,659 constituencies out of 5,664 counted. After the Lisbon treaty coming into effect Sweden gets 20 seats and the Pirate Party will most likely get a second seat.

Candidate Anna Troberg told Swedish telly that privacy issues and civil liberties are important to people and they demonstrated that clearly when they voted. Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt's conservative Moderates won 18.8 percent of votes seems to be the main victim of the Pirate Party's rise in the polls.

The Swedes will vote next year in a General Election and analysts think it will be a fight to the death for the two main parties. This means that the last thing that either of them want are the pirates winning any seats. Both are likely to have to make concessions on P2P and privacy if they want to keep the Pirate Party out of parliament.
Last modified on 08 June 2009
Rate this item
(0 votes)