Pirates on the advance

The Pirate Party (‘Píratar’) entered the Icelandic political scene in 2012. A year later it became arguably the first ‘pirate party’ in the world to have its candidates elected to a national parliament. Now in 2015, a new opinion poll now shows that it has become the third biggest political party in Iceland.

The ‘pirate’ movement

The ‘pirate’ political movement originated in Sweden. The name is associated with a controversial peer-to-peer file-sharing website called ‘The Pirate Bay’, whose Swedish founders were convicted in 2009 of assisting in copyright infringement. The media and film industries use ‘pirates’ as a catch-all term for campaigners against copyright infringement.

The Swedish Pirate Party was founded on 1 January 2006 in response to the backlash from anti-piracy lobbyists. The Pirate movement quickly spread with ‘pirate parties’ emerging in several other European countries. Iceland’s Pirate Party was founded on 24 November 2012 and is unofficially led by Birgitta Jónsdóttir.

Common policies of the international Pirate movement include: freedom of expression and communication, the defence of civil rights, the free flow of ideas, knowledge and culture, zero tolerance of discrimination, open access to data, and social and economic solidarity.

Extraordinary advances

In the 2013 general elections, the Icelandic Pirate Party secured 5.1% of the vote and returned three MPs (Birgitta Jónsdóttir, Jón Þór Ólafsson and Helgi Hrafn Gunnarsson) to parliament.

A new Gallup opinion poll now shows that the party has tripled its support base, with 15.2% of Icelanders declaring their intention to vote ‘Pirate’.

This places the Pirate Party in third place, behind the centre-right Independence Party (‘Sjálfstæðisflokkurinn’) and the centre-left Social Democratic Alliance (‘Samfylkingin’).