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Pirate Party runs aground in European Parliamentary elections

Down from two MEPs to one but founder claims 'strong improvement'

Update Voters have not been entirely kind to The Pirate Party in elections for the European Parliament.

Sweden's two Pirate Party European Members of Parliament have not been re-elected, with the local authorities tally suggesting a collapse in the Party's vote to 2.2 per cent, down from 2009's 7.1 per cent.

In Finland, where Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde sought a seat, counting the Party secured just 0.7 per cent of the vote.

But Germany's Piraten Partei has claimed victory, with candidate Julia Reda set to take win a seat after scoring 1.4 per cent of the vote.

She quickly set out her stall, on Twitter of course, as an opponent of the election's big winners: parties of the right opposed to the very idea of the European Union.

The UK's three Pirate candidates got nowhere near Reda's vote: they appear to have collectively won fewer than 10,000 votes, or just 0.05 per cent of those cast.

The Czech Republic's Česká pirátská strana polled a respectable 4.78 per cent of the vote, but that wasn't enough to secure a seat.

Pirate Party candidates in Greece, Slovenia, Spain and Hungary appear not to have secured sufficient votes to make it out of the “other parties” column in their nations' vote tallies.

Update

Pirate Party founder Richard Falkvinge has suggested the election results represent strong improvement.

Falkvinge's logic is that at the last European elections only one Pirate Party made it onto the ballot paper, but this year saw seven piratical nations try to win a seat and therefore an increased vote across the European Union. That the Czech party just missed out on a seat, and the German Party missed winning a second by a very slim margin, are worth celebrating.

The founder rates this "A painfully slow improvement, since it didn’t result in seats," adding that "the political world tends to be that painfully slow for people coming from the Internet. ®

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