In another display of insolence and bravado, the convicted felon Donald Trump decided to start ordering European businesses to disobey EU labor and anti-discrimination laws. The US government has precisely zero competence and authority over the European Union, its member-states, and European businesses’ compliance with EU law. In other words, the convicted felon has no right whatsoever to order any nation’s businesses to violate existing national, supranational, and international law.
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practices are solid recruitment and Human Resources (HR) tools that have been beneficial to businesses, universities, and organizations: they have helped them discover, gain, retain and utilize talent that would otherwise be overlooked and underutilized due to biases that have everything to do with potential employees’ color, sex, gender, and wealth, and nothing to do with how skilled or talented they really are. DEI is a competitive advantage that EU should fully embrace, instead of crippling its businesses by bowing down to Trump and his unhinged cabinet in their racist, bigoted, sexist, destructive “culture wars”.
Trump, a conman who has bankrupted every business he’s ever touched, is in no position to talk about best practices in hiring. What he really wants to do is make hiring racist, racist, and bigoted again – like himself. It’s bad enough that he’s undoing decades of work against exclusionary, racist, sexist practices in business hiring in the United States. His attempt to order European businesses about is beyond disgusting and must be rejected by Europe in the strongest way possible.
We, the Pirate Party of Greece, unequivocally condemn the United States’ interventionism; we condemn all of Trump’s allies in Greece and all over Europe; we call for EU regulatory organizations and businesses to ignore Trump’s illogical and outrageous demands; and call upon every democratic and humanist citizen, every rational professional, every EU enterprise, small and large, and every pro-democracy political party to unite against this out-of-control dictator and his goons.
In 2023, the 11th Congress of The Pirate Party of Greece approved a major update of its Statutes, taking significant steps towards clarifying our party’s ideological identity and giving it a clearly progressive direction. Among the amendments approved by the party’s Congress was the removal, from both the Statutes and the Founding Declaration, of the historically and politically illiterate reference that we do not place ourselves on the “obsolete” Left-Center-Right axis. This reference is a maxim that has hobbled the entire Pirate Movement since its beginning, as it still enjoys a fatwa-like status for most Pirate parties. Most Pirate parties’ leaderships still believe it gives them some sort of “flexibility” regarding the policies (especially fiscal ones) they will endorse in each political context, citing their desire to have a “context-dependent appeal”.
This, however, has been proven to be a misguided approach. For starters, as has been repeatedly pointed out to us, both by outside political analysts and by party members familiar with European political history, this maxim is suspiciously similar to the French slogan “ni droite, ni gauche” (neither left nor right). This slogan was adopted and used prominently by the infamous and conniving French neo-fascist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen for his own party, the Front National, later rebranded as Rassemblement National. For many years, there were ample warnings by knowledgeable political commentators that this common element between our movement and the French fascist party would be harmful, not only regarding how our movement would be perceived by progressive citizens, but also regarding what elements it would attract. Indeed, we saw prominent Pirates resign from their national Parties and abandon our movement citing their leaderships’ unwillingness to tackle the incursion of Holocaust deniers, Gamergaters, racists, homotransphobes, alt-right grifters, islamophobes, and so on. In some cases, these elements managed to take over the parties they infected and turn their vile agenda into official party line.
By prioritizing this ill-conceived “flexibility” over the universal humanitarian, egalitarian, and democratic values the Pirate Movement ostensibly espouses, the Pirate parties that have chosen to cling to the “ni droite, ni gauche” slogan like limpets to a rock injected the venom of neo-LePenism into the Pirate Movement. This is how the aforementioned far-right factions managed to hijack various national Pirate parties. Once they had achieved this, they could derail he Pirate Movement from the progressive hacker ideals that were born in 2600: The Hacker Quarterly and spawned the Free and Open Source Software movement and the movement for the protection of individual and civil liberties in cyberspace. These factions turned our movement’s official declarations of adherence to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, and the European Convention on Human Rights into empty, meaningless words, drowned by a cesspool of anti-feminist, anti-diversity, anti-equity, anti-inclusion, racist, genocidal, pro-Apartheid, pro-censorship rhetoric, taken from notorious sources of neo-fascist messaging and disinformation, like “Dr. Maalouf”, Peter “Sweden” Imanuelsen, Viségrad24, and Radio Genoa.
One might point out that the “ni droite, ni gauche” slogan was also used by “centrist” French President Emmanuel Macron in his campaign, but this does nothing to overshadow its most (in)famous use. As a matter of fact, it only adds fuel to the fire, as Macron is notoriously averse to democracy. He is well-known for his violent crackdown on protests against his neoliberal fiscal policies; we Pirates remember his horse-trading with the German government to pass Articles 15 and 17 (formerly 11 and 13, respectively) of the EU Copyright Directive [(EU) 2019/790] that was uncovered by Felix Reda, the best politician our movement ever had. More recently, we remember him for causing a snap election, citing the dangerous rise of the fascist Marine Le Pen. And then, he conspired with Le Pen to install an unpopular, obsessive, and incompetent electoral loser as Prime Minister, sidestepping the popular vote, which favored the Left. If anything, the use of this particular slogan by Macron makes him a neo-LePenist; it does not make the slogan less politically repulsive.
Contrary to what has been shamelessly claimed by some, the Pirate Ideology is not a vague, nebulous concept that can somehow be made compatible with sexist, patriarchal, alt-right, white supremacist, neo-colonialist, anti-woke policies. It is a concrete ideological framework that promotes democracy, the rule of law, equality, equity, inclusion, freedom, social justice, peace, and safety for everyone, regardless of skin color, place of birth, religion, financial status, or political beliefs. To stay focused on these goals, we need to keep our political vision perfectly clear. Thus, we must close once and for all the backdoors that allowed the far right’s venom to find its way into our movement, and this is precisely what we did in 2023.
True to the Pirate ideals, we are not going to stop there. Instead, we intend to continue our work to clarify and re-establish the vision of the Pirate Movement and restore its relevance and credibility. The Pirate Movement is inherently and innately progressive, democratic, egalitarian, and grassroots. Its true place is with the global progressive forces, from center-left and beyond; not with anti-democratic, reactionary forces like the European People’s Party and its far-right crutches. We know there are many Pirates around the world who share our desire to rebuild and recalibrate our movement. We cordially invite them to come with us so we can fight to curb the neo-fascist menace that threatens to undo every conquest in the field of human, civil, social, labor rights and freedoms, that threatens to destroy any sense of rule of law and any notion of democracy.
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.”[1] 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.
In our previous statement[1], we spoke of a shameful incident during a meeting of the Board of the Pirate Parties International (PPI) that was staged by two delegates of the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei Deutschland – PPDE) and the Russian Pirate Party’s delegate (PPRU) against then PPI chairwoman Ms. Florie Marie.
Back then, we wrote that we believe this dirty war against Ms. Marie could not have been waged without the PPDE’s leadership knowing about it. The fact that the two PPDE “mutineers” remained in the party and, when the “undesirable” Ms. Marie resigned from the PPI and left the Pirate Movement altogether, they were upgraded in the next PPI Board is solid proof. They were rewarded for their little “putsch”: Sebastian “Bastian” Krone became PPI treasurer, while Utz became a regular member[2]. We also wrote that this is highly suspect and stand by our position. Unfortunately, it seems that behaviors like these are not a new phenomenon.
In 2015, Andrew Norton, one of the founders of the United States Pirate Party, had reported that, as early as 2010, the Pirate Movement had ended up being run by the Central European parties and especially the German one[3]. What he wrote was, and still is, true. Starting from the composition of the Board, at least one regular member was always from the PPDE[4]. Usually, at least two regular PPI Board members were from the PPDE. In 2024’s PPI Board line-up, four out of nine (!) regular members were from the PPDE, and of the three alternate members, one[2]. Furthermore, some PPI Board members seem to be there for… life. This chronic overrepresentation of the PPDE in the PPI’s Board gives it a hegemonic position that allows it to manhandle the Pirate Movement as it sees fit.
There are several ways it does this. Norton mentioned a few: the PPDE has always made sure the Board was made up of people it preferred; it chose the time and place of the meetings so that only certain national parties’ delegates could easily participate; they always made sure the agenda, especially for the General Assembly, was the one they wanted, ignoring or sidestepping other parties. The list of deviations from ethical party governance does not end here: he spoke openly of a combination of inaction, lack of transparency, lack of accountability, even lack of respect to the Statutes and basic principles of democratic functioning. He found himself having to compare the PPI with the British royal family: a bunch of useless figureheads that fight against every effort to change the stagnant status quo.
What he said is still true today. His judgment is ruthless, but fair. We could simply point to the disgraceful events at the 24-5-2023 Board meeting and be done with it. That this was allowed to happen, with its instigators being rewarded instead of disciplined at national and transnational level says a lot. But this is not the only symptom of the rot at the heart of the PPI.
Trapped in its obsession with remaining a single-issue movement and in the cage of the historically illiterate and shockingly similar to French fascist Jean-Marie Le Pen’s maxim that we are “neither left-wing nor right-wing” (a maxim that we in the Pirate Party of Greece have abandoned in our 11th Conference), the German-ruled PPI is absent from world events and has little to say about the things that trouble people today: rising cost of living, impoverishment, erosion of the rule of law, degradation of social services (health, social security, education), unemployment, loss of workplace protections, loss of labor rights, promotion of the “forever war” idea”, rise of the goose-stepping alt-right. At best, it has reduced itself to an empty shell that only discusses party finances and redistribution of Board roles. Its extremely few political interventions are, at best, vague, timid, vapid, and empty.
We, the Pirate Party of Greece, are stressing once again that we unequivocally denounce and condemn all kinds of “camarilla”, all behaviors that violate party Statutes, and every attempt to manhandle and manipulate the Pirate Movement and its institutions. Such practices have no place in our ideological space and we shall always oppose them, especially when these actions promote policies and ideas that go against the Pirate Ideology, which is, by nature, progressive, anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-colonialist – “woke”, if you want to call it that. As far as we are concerned, with the recent amendments to our Statutes[5], which will be strengthened and enriched even more in the future, we are fortifying our party against the obscene practices we already mentioned, and are empowering our party’s instruments to properly and swiftly handle any such incident.
Furthermore, in our 11th Conference, with our new Statutes and the revision of our Founding Declaration, we address the ideological vagueness, the political vacuum, and the single-issue character of the Pirate Movement. We have strengthened and clarified our party’s progressive ideological identity and have removed any margin for nods to the far-right. Additionally we have started rewriting our political program, with our own ideas, ensuring that they have our Pirate Ideology at their core and present progressive proposals, aiming to improve life for the people. We intervene in the political scene, national and international, to the best of our ability, with frequent statements and Press releases. But we are not going to stop there. We are planning more actions and initiatives, which will be announced in due time. Finally, regarding the PPI, we are watching its internal developments very closely and with great worry. In time, and under full transparency, sincerity, and honesty, we will decide with our members upon our relationship with it.
