Translated from the original Greek-language post from September 2024.
Even before the 2024 European Elections, which were an unmitigated disaster for the Pirate Movement, reading the Flaschenpost, the official news apparatus of the German Pirate Party’s (Piratenpartei Deutschland – PPDE)’s Politburo, confirmed what we suspected from reading the X (formerly Twitter) posts of several prominent members and officials of the party. What primarily gave the game away was a collection of “analyses”, written by the party’s intelligentsia and several like-minded scribes, full of context-free, laced with islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism, justifications for the genocide against Palestinians and the theft of their lands committed by the Israeli Apartheid. The arguments put forward were grotesque in their similarity to those employed by collaborationist newspapers in countries occupied by Germany in WW2 in order to justify the wholesale massacres of entire villages in “retaliation” against resistance militias.
Then, after the humiliating European Elections of 2024, came a series of diatribes regarding the causes of their abject electoral failure, which dragged the European Pirate Party (PPEU) along. In these, the PPDE’s actual leadership, the Bundesvorstand (Federal Executive Board), displayed a clear lack of self-reflection and complete unwillingness to accept responsibility for its political choices, its actions, and its failures. Instead, the PPDE’s Politburo opted to go with narratives like “we did not have enough money,” “we were not visible enough online,” “we did not have people in places where we could get voters,” and “we did not have time to engage on social media.” It boggles the mind that they expect their members and voters to believe this. It becomes evident that the 0.50% they got was too generous.
That this was going to happen could be seen years before: the ship was heading at full speed towards jagged rocks, which were already known, were well-lit, recorded on the maps, marked by the ship’s radar, yet no one saw them. Such was the PPDE leadership’s faith in their choices. It is no coincidence that none of the PPDE’s policymakers felt the need to accept responsibility for the failure of both their party and the PPEU. Then, who was left to fall on his or her sword? The candidates, of course.
In reality, the PPDE has been ideologically and morally bankrupt for years now. Of course, none of its nomenklatura will admit it – they believe they are infallible, like the Pope once did. Their obsessive insistence on maintaining the historically baseless and suspiciously similar to the “ni droite, ni gauche” maxim of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National avoidance of any specific political identity made it possible for outright fascists and Holocaust deniers[2] to infest the party. In 2017, another year of electoral decline for the PPDE, they lost voters to the neo-nazi AfD[3]. Yet, it seems no one wondered what such people were doing in a Pirate party and, of course, no one showed them the door, before their toxic presence drove healthy members and officials out. We could be generous to the PPDE’s leaders and suppose they didn’t tell the AfD sympathizers that there’s no room for nazis in a Pirate party out of fear that this would constitute taking a positioning themselves on the left side of the “obsolete” Left-Center-Right axis, which remains an “anathema” for many Pirate parties.
But why are we saying the PPDE’s party officials believe they are infallible? First of all, despite their consecutive electoral failures, they have never reflected upon the political direction of the party. Yes, there have been reshuffles in the Bundesvorstand. Political directors, deputy political directors have stepped down. What did not change, however, was the party’s doctrine, which shows an unacceptable tolerance for far-right rhetoric to be transmitted by party members, often in such a manner that blurs the line between personal opinion and official party line. And if this doctrine has changed, the alt-right, anti-woke, misogynist, racist rants spewed by the likes of Max Kehm and Jan Sicars indicate a change for the much worse.
When a party claims to support human rights and the struggle against corruption, it cannot maintain its credibility when its members and officials go out and support the Palestinian genocide by the corrupt, neo-fascist Israeli apartheid regime. One automatically concludes that this party’s alleged opposition to corruption and human rights violations is a façade: for the PPDE, there are governments and states that are allowed to place themselves above and beyond International Law and trample it by massacring and torturing people, tearing the rule of law to shreds, maintaining a corrupt system of governance and supporting corruption and human rights violations in other states for profit (like Israel does with its extensive malware industry). And what are we supposed to think of a party whose members and officials support the vile, fascist agenda of grifters like the Canadian preacher of sexism and patron of misogynist terrorism Jordan Peterson or the completely insane Argentinean President Javier Milei? If PPDE was truly a progressive party, Kehm, Sicars, and their ilk would have been kicked out summarily and unceremoniously. This, however, has not happened, and shall not happen.
Then again, what are we expecting? This is a party that attempted (and failed), in the crudest of manners, to cover up a major sexual harassment scandal, whose perpetrator was Gilles Bordelais, a PPDE candidate for the 2019 European Elections. The party’s unwillingness to address this disgusting affair led Felix Reda, the most capable politician ever to grace any Pirate party, to resign from the PPDE and leave the Pirate movement altogether[4][5]. Any self-respecting party would have removed Bordelais from the ballot on the spot and take disciplinary action against him. The PPDE had all the information already in the summer of 2018, but chose to do nothing. Later, in the wake of Reda’s resignation, they tried to downplay the matter by saying that it did not matter that they kept him on the ballot, because the opinion polls showed he was unlikely to be elected anyway[6]. This line is utterly ridiculous and insulting to everyone’s intelligence, and we wonder how Patrick Breyer accepted to sign this announcement, permanently degrading himself by becoming the mouthpiece of a depraved party machine that should have been torn out years ago.
But the rancid Bordelais scandal was merely the continuation of another scandal, much more horrendous. In 2016, the PPDE was rocked by the case of its parliamentarian Gerwald Claus-Brunner[7]. Claus-Brunner, for all his colorful presence in the local Parliament and the media, was an extremely toxic man, who behaved in a vulgar and brutal manner even inside the party, spewed misogynistic slurs[8], and causing all sorts of trouble. His colleagues had even moved to dismiss him from the party. However, this motion was voted down, although other parties would not have tolerated his obscenities and bullying[9]. Then, things took an even darker and terrifying turn: on 19 September 2016, the next day of the – disastrous for the PPDE – elections in Berlin, Claus-Brunner was found dead. He had committed suicide, having first murdered a 29-year-old man he had been harassing for quite some time. The victim had reported Claus-Brunner to the authorities, but Claus-Brunner murdered him anyway[10].
In normal international and transnational political groups, parties riddled with scandals like the PPDE’s would have ended up marginalized and even expelled. How they managed, despite their complete inability to keep their own house in order, to maintain their status within the Pirate Parties International (PPI) is hard to fathom. We cannot imagine how any decent human being would choose, after these two malodorous scandals, to remain in a party that did nothing to prevent the worst, but tried to cover it all up and gaslight everyone after the fact. και να μην το εξαφανίσουν οριστικά. We are even more puzzled by how these scandals did not destroy the PPDE’s long-term campaign to become the dominant party within the PPI and impose its own agenda on the whole Pirate movement[11][12]. As Andrew Norton, one of the earliest members and officials of the US Pirate Party narrates[13], this campaign had started as far back as 2020, and already a lot had started to go downhill.
The machinations escalated and reached their peak with the riots of 24 May 2023, instigated by two PPDE Delegates in a meeting of the PPI’s Board as part of the PPDE’s “jihad” against Ms. Florie Marie, then-chairwoman of the PPI[12]. As we have already mentioned, Mr. Sebastian Krone και Ms. Utz were rewarded for their unethical and violent behavior. This, combined with the previous scandals, causes us to question the moral fiber of the entire party machine of the PPDE. These questions become even more burning if we take into account the PPDE’s turn to the alt-right, its openly racist stance against the illegally occupied Palestine, its contempt towards the United Nations, its participation in the amplification of libels against UNRWA, the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court. Still, for at least fourteen years, the PPI and the PPEU have been manhandled and strong-armed by the PPDE without – apparently – anyone raising an eyebrow. Why?
It is true that several initial successes of the PPDE helped it become a leading force in the Pirate Movement. Its close collaboration with EDRi (European Digital Rights) and Netzpolitik, its role in bringing forward the Schrems II case, and the betrayed struggle against Article 15 (formerly 11) και Article 17 (formerly13) of EU Directive 2019/790 on intellectual property rights helped it quite a bit. Meanwhile, and until the critical period (final quarter of 2019 and first quarter of 2019), few national Pirate parties had remained active to make much of an impact in the final outcome. The reasons for the decline of many national Pirate parties will be examined in another analysis. What we do know is that the PPDE, aided by Germany’s relatively generous legislation regarding the state funding of political parties, maintained a strong momentum and an extensive network of offices, webpages, and infrastructures that allow it to organize events, recruit members and, thus, avoid or delay its final collapse. And all this, despite the fact that it was on its way out of having a parliamentary presence in Germany as early as 2015.
Perhaps many Pirates outside Germany, seeing their national parties fall apart, clung on to their German counterparts. Does this show some resignation and delegation? Does this show that, instead of taking the initiative to rebuild their parties, they relied on the Germans to represent them? Yes. It is understandable. Of all national Pirate parties, only the German and the Czech ones have consistently campaigned to be elected in the European Parliament, whose role in the Ordinary Legislative Procedure of the European Union is crucial. Perhaps this caused them to support these two parties, instead of trying to regroup, reorganize, and rebuild their national parties. Why they did not do so is anyone’s guess. We can, however, relatively safety think of a few reasons, from our own experience. Perhaps some parties diluted their ideological and political profile by entering into coalitions with parties incompatible with the Pirate ideology; perhaps these parties ended up being led by inept officials who frustrated their members and voters; other Pirate parties may have become vehicles for the ambitions of a certain clique that did not care about the party at all. And so on.
With so many Pirate parties having faded into oblivion, the PPDE seemed like a lighthouse in the hurricane. But how long can one rest on past laurels? Or use them as some sort of papal indulgence? The PPDE’s aforementioned scandals, its lewd entanglement with the alt-right and the “anti-woke” septic tank, and its suspiciously unconditional support to Israel’s criminal apartheid regime create for it a portrait that cannot be beautified in any way. In short, anyone equipped with the fundamental principles of democracy, humanity, even basic human decency and dignity would say that the PPDE now lacks any moral legitimacy to lead the Pirate Movement or point the finger and lecture other parties on what a Pirate is. Still, as we saw in the PPI’s board, it manages, with the tolerance and cooperation of other parties, to perpetuate its stranglehold on our ideological space, exploiting every method, no matter how irregular, undemocratic, or immoral.
But is it unfair to bring back the Claus-Brunner and Bordelais scandals from the memory hole after so many years? No. Unfortunately, the PPDE’s stance against the members that protested Claus-Brunner’s misogyny and bullying is evidence of systemic misogyny. It shows that the party did not want to discipline its parliamentarian, not only because he was their “face” to the outside world, but because these complaints came from women. We know full well how women are treated in the Infromation Technology sector, and we know it firsthand. The PPDE’s laborious effort to postpone and sabotage every attempt to remove Bordelais from the ballot leads us to the exact same conclusion. The brutal, vulgar, sexist behavior of PPDE’s delegates against Ms Marie makes us understand that nothing has changed since then. Instead, we saw PPDE politicians, within the context of the party’s unconditional support to the crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli apartheid regime against the Palestinians, “enrich” their racist ramblings with attacks against the feminist and LGBTQI+ movements, adopting slogans and vocabulary lifted straight from the alt-right cesspool.
In the issues we have documented here, we, the Pirate Party of Greece, see all the symptoms of a gangrene within the PPDE. So far, there is no sign whatsoever that its leadership, at a local or national level, is willing to acknowledge and treat it. On the contrary, we see PPDE politicians insulting our intelligence to excuse the inexcusable, to act in utter arrogance and stooping down to the level of propagating libels against entire peoples. We see PPDE’s old “glories” weaponized to give it a free pass and legitimize the prolongation of its hegemony in the Pirate Movement. However, the PPDE, with its Politburo being exclusively and wholly responsible, has lost any moral and political legitimacy to speak on our behalf, to interpret the Pirate Ideology, or lecture other Pirate parties as to whether they can be called “Pirate” or not. In fact, it has become an anchor tied to the whole Pirate Movement. The longer it continues to control the PPI and the PPEU, the further it will lead the Pirate Movement into ideological, moral, and political derailment; this, in turn, will make the Pirate Movement’s electoral annihilation and place it at grave existential risk.
Πηγές:
[1] Spengler, A. (2024). Interview mit Piratenpartei-Chefin: Die Spitzenkandidatin im Gespräch. [online] www.schwaebische.de. Available at: https://www.schwaebische.de/regional/ulm-alb-donau/ulm/die-rechten-haben-die-aengste-der-menschen-geschuert-2612613.
[2] Huetlin, J. (2016). The Rise and Fall of the Pirate Party. [online] The New Republic. Available at: https://newrepublic.com/article/137305/rise-fall-pirate-party.
[3] Backes, L. (2017). Alle Versenkt. Der Spiegel. [online] 24 Mar. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/piratenpartei-selten-hat-sich-eine-partei-so-schnell-ueberfluessig-gemacht-a-1140369.html.
[4] Prager, A. (2019). EU Parliament failed to address sexual harassment, says outgoing Pirate Party star. [online] www.euractiv.com. Available at: https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/german-parliament-administration-failed-to-address-sexual-harrassment-says-julia-reda-former-rising-star-of-germany-pirate-party/.
[5] Reda, F. (2019). Warum die Piraten zur Europawahl unwählbar sind: Kandidat Gilles Bordelais. [online] YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2qS56P-7kA.
Spengler, A. (2024). Interview mit Piratenpartei-Chefin: Die Spitzenkandidatin im Gespräch. [online] www.schwaebische.de. Available at: https://www.schwaebische.de/regional/ulm-alb-donau/ulm/die-rechten-haben-die-aengste-der-menschen-geschuert-2612613.
[6] Breyer, P. (2019). Erklärung betreffend die Liste der Piratenpartei zur Europawahl 2019 [ergänzt am 24.03.2021]. [online] Available at: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/erklaerung-betreffend-die-liste-der-piratenpartei-zur-europawahl-2019/.
[7] BBC News. (2016). Berlin Pirate politician Claus-Brunner in ‘murder-suicide’. [online] BBC News. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37428122 [Accessed 24 Aug. 2024].
[8] Beikler, S. (2016). Zoff in Piratenfraktion in Berlin: Antrag auf Ausschluss von Claus-Brunner scheitert. [online] Tagesspiegel.de. Available at: https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/antrag-auf-ausschluss-von-claus-brunner-scheitert-5204989.html [Accessed 27 Aug. 2024].
[9] Meiritz, A. (2016). Gerwald Claus-Brunner: Pirat deutete Todesgedanken in Parlamentsrede an. [online] Spiegel.de. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/pirat-gerwald-claus-brunner-parlament-war-schon-laenger-alarmiert-a-1112987.html [Accessed 27 Aug. 2024].
[10] Meiritz, A. (2016). Toter Piraten-Politiker Gerwald Claus-Brunner: Fall gelöst, Fragen offen. [online] Spiegel.de. Available at: https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/gerwald-claus-brunner-ermittlungen-werden-eingestellt-a-1113493.html [Accessed 27 Aug. 2024].
[11] Pirate Party of Greece (2024). Quo Vaditis, Piratae? – Part 2. Κόμμα Πειρατών Ελλάδας – Pirate party of Greece. [online] Available at: https://www.pirateparty.gr/2025/02/quo-vaditis-piratae-part-2/ [Accessed 14 Feb. 2024].
[12] Pirate Party of Greece (2024). Quo Vaditis, Piratae? – Part 1. Κόμμα Πειρατών Ελλάδας – Pirate party of Greece. [online] Available at: https://www.pirateparty.gr/2025/01/quo-vaditis-piratae-part-1/ [Accessed 01 Feb. 2024].
[13] Norton, A. (2015). Andrew Norton: PPI Became a Pirate Chimera [Pirate Visions] | PirateTimes. [online] Archived at: https://web.archive.org/web/20150315164041/http://piratetimes.net/andrew-norton-ppi-became-a-pirate-chimera-pirate-visions/ [Accessed 30 Jun. 2024].
#altright #GerwaldClausBrunner #GillesBordelais #PiratenparteiDeutschland #PPDE #PiratePartiesInternational #PPI #Camarilla #PirateMovement
