The Swedish Pirate Party failed to repeat the success of last year’s European Parliament elections, receiving fewer than 1.4 percent of the votes in the Swedish general elections on Sunday.
Swedish election officials categorize the Pirate Party in a group of “other” political parties that collectively received about 1.4 percent of the votes. All of the votes have not been counted, however, so it is unknown exactly how many it received. An exit poll put the Pirate Party’s tally at about 0.7 percent of the total vote. In Sweden, at least 4 percent of the votes are needed to gain seats in the parliament.
The Pirate Party campaigned on issues such as reforming copyright law, getting rid of the patent system and ensuring that citizens’ rights to privacy are respected.
The result wasn’t what it had what expected, party officials wrote in a blog post on Monday. In the European Parliament elections, the party garnered 7.1 percent of the votes, helped by the attention the Pirate Bay trial garnered. But this time around the other parties did their best to not talk about issues such as privacy, the blog post said.
The Pirate Party did its best to drum up interest around its core issues by agreeing with WikiLeaks to host its servers and provide the site bandwidth for free. It also provided the infamous file-sharing site The Pirate Bay with bandwidth. But in the end that wasn’t enough.
The Pirate Party isn’t giving up and still plans to take part in the general elections and the next European Parliament elections in 2014. Party officials also plan to attend an appeals hearing on Sept. 28 for the four men convicted in the Pirate Bay trial, according to the blog post.
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