Marcel Kolaja, OTOH, hasn't. Here's a translation of his latest tweets:
> I find the election result hugely disappointing. As the leader of the candidate, I take responsibility for it.
> In the campaign, we failed to sell our work and explain the solutions we offer. I see it as a failure for us and other pro-European parties that the far right has grown so much in the Czech Republic.
> Secondly, I am also quitting as an MEP. It has been an honour to represent you in the European Parliament for five years. My sincere congratulations to @MarketkaG on winning her mandate and my fingers are crossed.
> She needs to work three times harder now in promoting pirate values. But I believe she can do it.
From this tweet, and from https://eurovolby.pirati.cz/ (and a fair amount of automated translation), I understand that Marcel was the leader but he is leaving his seat to Marketa, and that she is the last representative of the PP in the EP, right?
Marcel did great work for open source in the EP over the last 2 legislatures. Many thanks to him.
It's a shame Kolaja wasn't re-elected, and it's not looking rosy for privacy and FLOSS in the EU.
I'm disappointed the Czech Pirates didn't touch on these subjects at all in their campaign. The advertising I saw was basically just saying "we exist", and digital privacy was hidden in a broad and generic programme statement. All I could say to support Pirates when talking with friends and family was "I trust them for no particular reason, and Kolaja does good work in the areas I focus on". Not the most persuasive recommendation.
I know it's hard to create an honest-but-captivating campaign for elections to what's really an "upper chamber", without the ability to propose its own legislation. But when you have a clear bogeyman like "Chat Control" or software legislation, you use it, damn it!
It's worse than that. Czech pirate party also lost most of their members. The other member states also failed to gain any new ones.
As someone who ran a national party for a while, it feels like an end of an era.
The generation that started the Pirate party is getting older (in our 30s or older) and we're loosing (realistically, lost it a while back) our energy. If we had managed to establish the Pirates as an established party, then that would be fine, but we didn't (except in Czechia).
And now, even if you manage to give the Party to a new generation (as we did, before I left) the cultural moment is gone. Now it feels like people don't know or care about digital rights — even tho they affect them way more than they did 10 years ago when we were in our prime. If you'll allow me a hypothesis: everyone interested in IT got (financially) fat and lazy, and now we don't care anymore.
In the words of Douglas Adams: "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
In my country the pirate party demolished itself when it spread into other political fields. A lot of idpol imported from the US took over net policy issues, freedoms and rights were completely secondary.
The whole understanding about digital freedoms and rights changed. It was like they changed their values over night and appealed towards completely different issues. Some even demanded more surveillance because "hate speech" was all the rage in this changed party. This new outlook was not only not attractive, it suddenly became quite repulsive.
While a party like the pirate party probably has difficulties to consolidate opinions in other fields than net policy, it wouldn't have been impossible. But it was done with a strange fervor around sometimes completely arbitrary and artificial issues not related to net policies.
Quite a few parties suffered from either takeovers and the "crazy people magnet". Everyone with fringe views on ... anything ... decided that the Pirates were the place to be.
Which, fine happens, the problem we had was, that the core ideology was very anti-censorship, so much so, that in the end those fringe groups dominated the discussion.
In my country it might have been the same. Although the anti-censorship positions quickly evaporated and were replaced by something completely different. Freedom of speech became a far right dog whistle to some and hate speech was all the new rage and state surveillance a must to combat unsanctioned opinions.
On the other side, you had ideologues promoting strict libertarian positions, which were also quite repellent because they were inflexible about their own belief system and their policy suggestions crude at best, completely anti-social at worst.
Overall there was no discussion on which positions the party should take on specific issues and instead it was mostly prescribed top down. I believe people just noticed that they don't share the same values as the party anymore and so they left.
I was never a member, but followed their developments for a time.
The alternative is being a single-issue party which people will only vote for when there is nothing more important on their minds. IMO it is good for a party to have a clear profile on most important issues, and digital rights fit into the overall progressive ideology. Another possible direction would probably be libertarian profile for techbros, but that would be a different party.
Except there are already other much bigger progressive parties here. Really most major parties tend to err on the progressive side these days. So they both alienated people that don't agree on their new focus whiile failing to convince the progressives to vote for them instead of the larger parties.
I think there's still people who care, I know I do and a lot of my peers in tech do too.
The problem is, I guess, that in times of multiple crisis which only seem to get worse, people worry about other things.
I am sad though that I agree, the fight for digital liberty and authority over your own data has largely been lost for the majority of people, and they don't seem to understand or care enough to change it.
The solution to "multiple crisis which only seem to get worse" is to go on the offensive, and lobby for laws that answer those questions in the way we like. Changing an established law is much different than adding a new one.
One possible solution would be that people who cares about digital rights and privacy would integrate a "true" leftist party, and advocate there for them to care about it.
That worked in France with La France Insoumise, that voted against Chat Control, and they have 9 seats now.
In my not so humble opinion, Czech Pirate Party went to shit because the saint trinity of Bartos, Michalek & Ferjencik decided that the party must look "professional", which means most competent millenials around me felt that they'd not be able to contribute to "such a competent organization" despite party lacking competent people.
Then Ferjencik spent a shitton of part money as the head of PR promoting his sister Olga in order for the party not to look so sausage-festy without disrupting the power balance instead of concentrating on mobilizing more people to come help out.
All that combined with internal populism and push to accept more and more members who were not even remotely Pirates besically turned it into a right leaning liberals with basically only the EU bunch staying true to the original idea of general populace being able to hold those in power accountable.
One of my latest acts as a member, I've moved to cancel accepting a new member who literally told us that he hopes he'd be promoted in the public company since Pirates have the Mayor, that he is against legalizing recreational drugs, insisted on sterilizing trans people "to prevent genes to spread" and wanted to keep harsh copyright around teaching materials because "those are important, right?"
And I had to fight HARD to revoke his acceptance as a member.
I checked their EP members' activity briefly prior to election, and that seemed to match their program and my expectations. Good.
But locally, it's indistinguishable from the outside from any other right wing party, anymore. I've lost trust in their transparency spiel/program, too. Their foreign minister is insufferable, and the rest are pretty much invisible. No idea why they wanted this ministry. It's the most visible ministry they have, but irrelevant to pirate program of transparency/anti-corruption. Foreign policy is set by the government as a whole anyway. Probably a ministry where they can have the least effect.
And execution by the ministry seems to be according to true old school piracy, rather than modern political one - proudly aligning with extreme anti-human rights fringe depending on context - while proclaiming care for human rights, and equal and just treatment of issues.
Single issue parties can't live long. They can inject issues into discussion, but they can't grow an d eventually fail and that's not a bad thing. Patrick Breyer made allies in other parties.
Pirate parties in EU have people with very different political views on every other issue.
In Finland it was eventually taken over by weirdos who used the party to push other agendas and others dispersed. Now we have handful of people who take these issues seriously in Greens and at least 1 in left. Two on the National Coalition Party sometimes get it. Its better than it was with the Pirate party.
Can't live long.. because the voting system is specifically designed to keep it that way.
We don't have to have voting systems like this though. For example, I would be a fool to vote for my preferred party if there's a 50-50 chance of it not going over the threshold for counting. If you do that you basically throw away your vote, and that's stupid. There is an easy fix though: if your party doesn't get in, you should be able to just write your backup choice on the ballot. Then I can vote for my niche party and still be comfortable that my vote will go somewhere useful when they don't get in.
In Ireland, elections (including European parliament) use proportional representation with single transferable vote¹. This system was adopted after we gained independence so that minorities (such as Unionists) would still have political representation. I think it’s a very fair system – particularly compared to the first-past-the-post that our old colonial masters continue to use and it allows small political parties to have the opportunity to grow.
In the recent EU parliament election, I gave my first preference vote to a new independent candidate whose politics I agree with but I figured would be very unlikely to be elected. When they are eliminated (at one of the counts where it turns out they are the remaining candidate with the lowest number of votes), my second and successive preference then count.
It’s probably easier to see how it works in practice: if you check the election results for my constituency, Dublin² and select Count 1, you can see that 1,065 people voted for the candidate with the lowest number of first preference votes. At Count 2, you can see how 937 of second preference votes were distributed to the remaining candidates (128 of his voters didn’t care to specify a second preference). This pattern of eliminating candidates with the lowest amount of votes repeats until one of the candidates exceeds the quota and is deemed elected – and that candidate’s surplus (number of votes exceeding the quota) votes will be proportionally transferred to the remaining candidates.
Theoretically all of my preferences could count so before voting I made a list of all 23 candidates in order of preference: starting with those I wanted to win, followed by those I could live with in the middle, and down at the very end, those I really didn’t want to win.
According to the relevant EU legislation³, something called a “list system” can also be used for electing MEPs but I’m not familiar with how that works.
Thank you very much for sharing this, and the accompanying documentation. I had no idea that Ireland had such a system in place. It seems really elegant and efficient, and better than say the Condorcet voting method. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method)
>There is an easy fix though: if your party doesn't get in, you should be able to just write your backup choice on the ballot. Then I can vote for my niche party and still be comfortable that my vote will go somewhere useful when they don't get in.
^ This, exactly. In France, digital rights isn't at the forefront of people's worries either (environment, inflation and buying power, societal questions, security, etc). That being said, at least in France, they also stand for a more direct form of democracy, and they seem to apply internally what they preach, which if true would be a unique feature.
Then again, I don't know for sure if this is really the way they operate or not. I was never part of this party, because although they know being called "pirate" party is a turnoff for voters, they don't seem able to take the logical step of changing it. They seem nice enough, with some interesting proposals, but what working adult has time for participating in self-defeating orgs?
The main problem with the Pirate Party is that they're a one-issue party: even if you agree with what Breyer is fighting for in the EU parliament (I certainly do), it's hard to vote for them when the real world unfortunately has more going on than just digital rights and other parties offer more complete goals on that end.
The world is too much on fire right now to have the luxury of voting for a one-issue party.
They're not single issue any more. But that has two issues:
1. people still think they are single issue
2. because they are not single issue, the people who find out they aren't anymore will be dismayed at something in their program that is stupid and rule them out
Or maybe their problem is that they no longer are a single issue party and many of their original supporters just object to the other goals they have added to their program.
Their position on privacy was good, but a complete opposite to their other (disastrous) ideas. You'll find structural pro-privacy with parties like ECR.
Not in specific. Most European parties (including ECR) have many national parties as members, and don't campaign on specific issues themselves. They have general principles they agreed upon. The relevant one here is "ECR Party understands that open societies rest upon the dignity and autonomy of the individual, who should be as free as possible from state coercion."
You'd have to look at the campaign programs of the ECR-member national parties, and likely ask the MEPs directly. My experience is that they highly value privacy.
An approach I've had to EU elections is that tiny, single-seat parties often do invaluable opposition work through parliamentary requests and access to internal documents.
It's why it's sad to see Pirates lose their representation, even though their program isn't great.
"Then I checked out the Green Party, but they were against it too. Then I checked out the Social Democrats, and they didn't speak out about open source. Then I check the other parties, and did not vote."
You can't expect to agree on all issues with a party. Weigh their programs (and voting history; I cannot stress enough how a party's history is a much better indication than their program) according to your views, and pick the top one. Otherwise your vote is lost to some party you probably share even less with.
> Then I checked out the Social Democrats, and they didn't speak out about open source.
"Not speaking out" is not against. But being anti-nuclear is clearly a stand against.
Any party can't have binary decisions on everything, and that's fine, this means business as usual on an issue by issue basis. But where they _do_ have a binary stand, it matters.
I do agree with the parent comment though, in today's day and age needing huge coal free electrification targets in short timeframes to save the planet, being explicitly anti-nuclear power is a clear red flag, and doubly makes no sense for a digital technological party to have this stand.
> and doubly makes no sense for a digital technological party to have this stand
I sometimes wonder if these politics taking over fringe parties are deliberate attempts to destroy them. Because yeah it doesn't make sense that they would make that part of their program.
Because it's the greenest and safest form of base load power we have right now. It may be more expensive but the loss of human capital vs burning coal and the reliability vs renewables makes it more valuable, and that's on top of diversifying Europe's fuel sources which is a good thing.
If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so. When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world. And it is a question of "when", not one of "if". Mistakes, boeing-like profit-maximizing strategies, terrorism, war. A heavy explosive on a nuclear power plant effectively creates a dirty bomb.
I think these arguments shouldn't be wiped under the rug.
> If you compare it to transportation it is a bit like flying: its the safest way and it has many other upsides, but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic. With nuclear power even more so.
But flying is still the safest way to travel, despite a few tragic accidents. This logic doesn't make any sense.
> When a nuclear accident happens a large area can be rendered uninhabitable for a period longer than the written history of the world.
Chernobyl exclusion zone is roughly 50x50km and life is actually flourishing in there. You can see it as a tiny natural reserve which are numerous on earth and are generally seen as a good thing.
> but when it goes wrong it's usually catastrophic.
That depends on the type since not all nuclear power plants are the same design. Here in Canada the CANDU style is very safe in design and uses natural uranium fuel not plutonium. or even thorium.
That's a good analogy. If there is a problem with nuclear it is a BIG THING(tm) that makes the news and gets people scared. Just like a plain crash. But those events are extremely rare. Meanwhile coal/cars get to slowly rack up many more kills and the general public doesn't care.
It's not only the dam (which was helpful for keeping the power plant cooled down) that was destroyed by the russians. There is also evidence that they planted explosive devices in the power plant. The whole power plant is taken as a hostage.
The huge difference is the lasting time. Few days or a week the water has gone and you can start with repairs/rebuilding. But after a nuclear disaster all is polluted for foreseeable future and not usable even if all infrastructure and buildings are intact and look safe.
Which is not true, if you look into for example Three Miles Island reactor meltdown, where from outside point of view, there is no difference and only 600 meters exclusion zone from the reactor.
Furthermore nuclear disasters killed dozens of people, while water related disasters killed thousands of people. Another reason to ban dams.
They usually don't start inhabited, but then the people building and working at it want to live closer, which pulls in the support roles of stores, which bring more people, etc etc etc.
If you build somthing in the middle of nowhere, and employ people there, the somthing will create a local population.
There are not that many big enough inhabited places left in Europe. And if you build them in Siberia, you're back to square one - dependency on the current tyrant in charge.
I love that France uses the same strategy for Nuclear power as I did with SimCity back as a 12 year old. Look at where the Chooz power station is for example. If their reactors had a melt down it wouldn't be France (for the most part) that suffered.
To be fair, it also isn't only France that benefits from those reactors. Energy prices in Germany would be even worse without nuclear power plants right next to the border.
It's foolish because, you don't have to be on the extremes of being against or for.
We face huge coal free electrification targets in short timeframes to save the planet. A rational administrator would focus on the larger goal, and decide on a project basis.
Being explicitly anti nuclear, in today's situation, that too for a young technological party (without the 75 year old past that greens have no choice but to cling on to) — is a red flag / potential sign of hidden administrative irrationality.
Safety arguments aside, the main sources of uranium are outside of Europe, which means dependence on countries that we have weaker treaties with. While not the end of the world, it really doesn't fit the path to energy independence.
Let's please not start this nuclear discussion again. All arguments have been said and are clear on both sides and these discussions on HN don't lead anywhere.
Yes, there is some investment in batteries, but due to how the market is structured, they are either equivalent of local large scale UPS, or mainly operate grid frequency stabilization while fossil fuel plants spin up or down (some of the "spin down" support can be also done with modern wind turbines, as they can operate as "sinks" on energy).
Unless we reset the way energy market operates in EU to prioritize dispatchable-but-fossil-free[1], I think we won't see neither proper nuclear resurgence, nor appropriate battery build up.
[1] My personal idea is that we should promote and prioritize sources that offer stable and dispatchable power without emissions. Such conditions would be fulfilled both by nuclear and renewables combined with energy storage, promoting build up of energy storage.
You're not up to date anymore I'm afraid. Two-three years ago your comment would be correct, but things change FAST in this area. Grid-level battery has changed a lot. Look at this graph: https://archive.ph/Vj2py
That's a great link about what's happening with grid-scale battery storage ("giant batteries the size of shipping containers"), supporting solar and wind power replace other source of energy in states like California, Arizona, Texas, Florida.
Sorry, should have been more specific about location (thought it was implied from topic of discussion regarding EU Parliament).
But as it is now, that's not something that is happening in EU, as far as I know.
Some of the more recent projects turned out to have a tendency to go on fire.
As for USA, I have no idea how well it works out, as USA seems to have wildly different market setup than EU. My usual sources show under 1% for California.
Battery plants at the scale of conventional nuclear power plants are very few so it's not as proven as a technology. Ideally we should build both since we don't want the EU to be dependent on a single material for its base load (i.e. lithium or uranium).
I really doubt that battery plants for longer duration storage will be lithium based, something redox-flox based will be the future. But with batteries (especially grid scale, where energy and power density matter much less) there are a multitude of feasible options, some more, some less economic, which means in case of material shortages we can switch in the medium term. I also think hydroelectric storage is an underappreciated opportunity, which, if there is a serious issue with chemical battery supplies, could be reasonably quickly expanded.
It's also silly to use batteries as base load, as is the concept of base load in general in combination of cheap, but non-dispatchable, renwables, which is one of the things that hurts the economics of nuclear plants.
Nuclear is cheaper than renewables+storage. Europe routinely has periods of 2 weeks with little to no wind across the continent (<10% capacity usage on wind power) during winter, when solar production is abysmal. You'd need batteries to store MONTHS of production, and build massive amounts of solar and wind power plants that would all overproduce at the same time and thus not be profitable in the slightest when they're at capacity.
I dont necessarily disagree with you, but there is the safety concerns that need to be addressed for the nuclear energy option to become more acceptable. A nuclear powerplant must be able to explode and not kill a lot of people and render a large piece of the earth uninhabitable. If you solve that for me, then I will wholeheartedly agree with everything you just said.
I'm not aware of anyone having a solution for "batteries" at the required scale. We'd need several TWh of storage, there could be a month without wind.
The only reason nuclear scales so slowly is because of the bureaucracy.
There actually have been many months without more than half of nuclear reactors in France in 2022 - beginning 2023. And in France there are not enough different energy sources to compensate.
Taking down such reactors is a periodically routine for maintenance. The question is only how fast you can bring them up again (especially in case of serious repair needs).
> But your point about French NPs is technicality which can be rectified.
No, you cannot avoid using electricity few months in summer to have electricity for the rest time. And you cannot double the number of extremely costly NPs to have one half online while another half is being maintained/repaired.
Around here they are non-electable even if they actually had a complete coherent program (which they had a bit more due to joining with a fringe green party), due to the electoral threshold. Fortunately due to the remaining votes system the votes from the PP will very likely go to a party which also votes against the forced chat control though it will not result in them getting another seat.
Perhaps the German pirate party should have sticked to focusing on privacy and digital rights instead of becoming a second Green party with a far left bend.
Really his snide at the right gaining traction in his posts shows that he still doesn't get it.
I will deeply deeply having someone so well connected to such incredibly complex contemporary digital rights issues in a place of power. Patrick Breyer's work in advocating & sharing what's going on has been such an incredibly high form of service, has illuminated such a dark & scary part of governance, and it's hard to imagine who else in the world is going to step up & be the light in Patrick's absence.
From what I have experienced with the national pirate party is an extremely weird mix of a single issue digital rights party, coupled to a far left social activism group.
For obvious reasons such a party doesn't do well. If you want to do left wing social activism, there are much broader, better organized groups and parties available. And if you are a long term employeed member of the middle class, potentially already with a family, the social activism can easily be very unappealing.
Looking at their website you can quickly notice the soft contradictions. How can you have a party which theoretically is pro free-speech, but then the most recent issue on their website is about how people who are mean on the Internet should face legal consequences? (That the site is also broken, doesn't make them look any better)
I do really believe that a single issue digital rights party could do good in the EU parliament. But certainly I wouldn't vote for the Pirate party.
Not one non-incumbent candidate that I talked to in my country was even aware of Chat Control, and the one incumbent (who was re-elected) responded with the typical “think of the children” spiel.
As a German citizen, the amount of times I heard from the "Piratenpartei" can be counted on one hand.
In the early 2000s that party suffered immensely from being hijacked by Neo Nazis, losing a lot of support from voters.
Since the Nazis went off and joined the AFD, the Pirate Party is more or less silent.
The worst part was when they hardly commented on Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks!
Weird, to me the Piratenpartei always appeared as being a single issue digital rights party mixed with very far left politics. Right now their most recent issue seems to be people being mean on the Internet, which certainly seems to be more in line with the SPD, who seek to punish people for even the most banal insults.
That's sad to see. I was a member for about 4 years, but the party was more and more interested in arguing about distant things like basic income, than more relevant topics. Also, I really disliked that they voted against having a decentralized party conference and always required on site meetings.
Frankly, most "pirate topics" are things that are distant for most people.
People firstly care about migration, Ukraine war, things around energy, and secondly culture war topics. At least in my country, that stuff dominated the debates. (Especially the Ukraine war support.)
People don't care that much about chat control, GDPR, cookie laws, file sharing (the original Pirate topic), or even USB ports on iPhones. They do care but not that much to vote for them.
Which I find hugely amazing since it's a boogeyman for other actual problems.
Here the migrants are "taking our houses", but if you look at the actual statistics it's not even a drop in the ocean (there are some local variances but nothing significant). The main culprit is 15 years of no significant construction and hand waiving by those who already bought a house.
Here major cities would be shrinking without migration. Meaning that with zero new construction housing would become more available.
It is self evidently true that the demand for housing migration creates increases prices and reduces availability for housing. Regardless what you think about migration policies, denying such an obviously true statement makes you look ridiculous.
Be serious 2 seconds ! They can't afford the housing you're referring to anyway and the city economy would shrink too and then you'd complain about that...
>They can't afford the housing you're referring to anyway
What? They live in the same type of building I live in. Their rent is paid by the government if they can't pay themselves. Have you never been to a major German city? Visit any part of the city which isn't for millionaires only and you will find it inhabited by locals and migrants. You are completely delusional if you think otherwise.
>and the city economy would shrink too and then you'd complain about that...
This is irrelevant to the economics of housing. Migrants drive up housing costs, that is the most basic economics.
However, I understand from a couple of posts that Markétka Gregorován(https://gregorova.eu/ / https://x.com/MarketkaG) has been reelected.
Marcel Kolaja, OTOH, hasn't. Here's a translation of his latest tweets:
> I find the election result hugely disappointing. As the leader of the candidate, I take responsibility for it.
> In the campaign, we failed to sell our work and explain the solutions we offer. I see it as a failure for us and other pro-European parties that the far right has grown so much in the Czech Republic.
> Secondly, I am also quitting as an MEP. It has been an honour to represent you in the European Parliament for five years. My sincere congratulations to @MarketkaG on winning her mandate and my fingers are crossed.
> She needs to work three times harder now in promoting pirate values. But I believe she can do it.
From this tweet, and from https://eurovolby.pirati.cz/ (and a fair amount of automated translation), I understand that Marcel was the leader but he is leaving his seat to Marketa, and that she is the last representative of the PP in the EP, right?
Marcel did great work for open source in the EP over the last 2 legislatures. Many thanks to him.