Aargh! Pirates in Parliament (and other tales from the Euro elections)

Avast, there be pirates in the Parliament.

Well, one pirate at least, and no we’re not talking about Somalia here, but Sweden and the results from last week’s elections for the European Parliament, the main law-making body of the European Union.

Sweden’s Pirate Party pulled off what many thought was impossible, getting enough votes to actually win a seat in the new Parliament – the Pirate Party just squeaked over the 7% threshold to win themselves a seat in the upcoming Euro Parliament. The platform of the Pirate Party is, well, pro-Pirate you could say: they advocate basically scrapping all intellectual property laws: no copyrights, no patents, just the free flow of information.

Considering some of the other groups who won seats in the new Parliament, the Pirate Party will likely be a welcome distraction. Turnout for the European Parliament elections, held in all 27 European Union nations, were incredibly low – just over a four in ten eligible voters even cast ballots. And that paved the way for a collection of far-right parties, some overtly racist, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic ones, to win seats.

One of the big winners was the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders who is so virulently anti-immigrant (though he reserves special scorn for the Muslims), that he’s actually been banned from entering Great Britain. His Freedom Party gathered 15% of the Dutch vote, giving them 25 seats in the new Parliament. Not to be out done though, the Brits threw enough support to the British National Party to give them their first-ever seats (eight total) in Parliament. The BNP is strongly anti-immigrant, wants to keep Turkey out of the European Union, along with getting Great Britain to drop out as well. They dispute that they’re racist though, saying they’re just as opposed to white Polish immigrants as they are to black Nigerian ones (great argument guys…). And finally, Italy will be sending members of their own anti-immigrant party, The Northern League, to Parliament, though in the past the groups the Northern League have considered to be foreigners include Southern Italians.

In practice, the far-right groups will make headlines, but it’s unlikely they’ll make much law. Power in the European Parliament comes from coalitions of parties coming together across national boundaries; the far-right parties won’t be able to gather enough support to form an effective coalition. But the rise in support for them, along with the historically low turnout across Europe, is troubling signs that Europeans in general are apathetic about the European Parliament. Critics say its just another level of bureaucracy in an already bloated EU government – even though the European Parliament has broad powers to make laws. At the same time, there has been real reluctance in parts of Europe to adopt changes to the EU’s constitution that would strengthen the Parliament on the grounds that it would mean a loss of national sovereignty among the members of the EU.