Things Just Ain’t What They Used To Be: The syndrome is a classic one, afflicting us all, as youthful enthusiasm gradually gives way to middle-aged conservatism and stuffiness. In German politics, who once best represented that callow exuberance better than the Green Party*? Theirs was a genuine grass-roots movement, pioneering the concept within Europe – and beyond – of an ecology-oriented political organization, while the member from their ranks who ultimately gained the most national power – Joschka Fischer, Vice-Chancellor for seven years under Gerhard Schröder – had once been a Frankfurt street-fightin’ man.

That’s all different now, as Stephan-Andreas Casdorff writes in the Berlin paper Der Tagesspiegel (Resistance to the well-adjusted grows). For him, the Party is “no longer recognizable” in the maneuvering that is now underway to select its new leadership. Both its internal debates and those it conducts with fellow legislators in the German Lower House (Bundestag) are now as bland as any other politicians’.

Part of this can be ascribed to the fact that the Party has been so successful in actually capturing power. As mentioned, with Joschka Fischer and a team of other cabinet members it actually was a governing party for a while at the federal level. That’s not true right now – it may become true again – but there is a Green in charge of one of the country’s richest and most dynamic states, Baden-Württemberg (that’s mainly where you’ll find the big auto-producing companies, for example; the Landeschef or Governor there is Winfried Kretschmann) as well as in numerous lower-level state and municipal offices throughout the land. With power comes responsibility, so they say, and thus a sort of maturing.

In Casdorff’s eyes the embodiment of what the Green Party has become, and why, is Jürgen Trittin. Once leader of the Party’s radical wing, he accompanied Fischer into Gerhard Schröder’s cabinet, went on to other important posts, and so became a confirmed pragmatist along the way. Back in his radical days, such as when he had just become Federal Minister for the Environment, he was known in particular for his demand that . . . er, all German nuclear power plants be closed down. Anyway, he is now a leading candidate to take up Party leadership once again.

Even if he succeeds, though, he won’t sole Party leader – the Greens don’t do that. They still always have two co-equal leaders, unlike any of the other German political parties. That includes the Piratenpartei, the German Pirate Party, which itself is now inspiring politics of a new kind throughout Europe (and beyond) the way The Greens once did. The torch has been passed.

* Formally known since 1993 as “Alliance ’90/The Greens.”

One key factor affecting the entire ongoing Eurocrisis was known to cognoscenti as “NRW” – short for Nordrhein-Westfalen, the German state whose local elections on May 9 did much to influence both the nature and timing of Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel’s response to the grave threat to the euro and even the EU arising from the Greek financial problems. That is well and good, but those same NRW elections at the same time had another rather different significance for a separate voting bloc, one not necessarily so interested in the mere potential for collapse of the common European currency. These citizens are overwhelmingly young and male; they usually converse in Java and C++ as easily as in their native German; and they vote for the German Pirate Party, whose disappointing results in that same ballot saw its share of the overall vote drop to 1.5% from the full 2% share it had enjoyed during last Fall’s nationwide election.

You might recall that this political organization, like all the off-shoots of the original Pirate Party in Sweden, takes for its purpose advocacy mainly for Internet-related issues such as copyright reform, digital civil rights, and the prevention of Internet censorship. Philip Kuhn of Die Welt recently sat down with party leader Jens Seipenbusch for a brief interview in the wake of those poor electoral results. (more…)

If you’re into peer-to-peer downloading of large files (e.g. movies, music) from the Internet, you know already know all about it; if you’re not, here’s a quick summary. The most popular program for doing so is called BitTorrent, and for quite some time The Pirate Bay, a site based in Sweden, was the most popular place to go to get the files you might be interested in (you know, like Hollywood movies still in general public release – or even yet to embark upon public release). Naturally, The Pirate Bay came under some considerable legal pressure for its activities, until this past spring the main personnel behind it were sentenced to jail and to the payment of a hefty SEK 30 million fine. (They are appealing the verdict.) In the meantime, the Swedish advertising company Global Gaming Factory X AB has announced its intention to buy The Pirate Bay next month and give it a “new business model” that makes the site’s activities strictly legal. In the meantime, though, some of the people behind The Pirate Bay have formed The Pirate Party – with chapters not just in Sweden but other countries as well – to advance their free-file-sharing political views, which already won one seat in the European Parliament in the early-June elections.

The (eventual) metamorphosis of The Pirate Bay to legality is especially good news for the French government, which has been busy since the beginning of the year trying to come up with legal measures to pass to outlaw the sort of free downloading of copyrighted commercial material that The Pirate Bay did so much to facilitate. After modifying their legislation to meet the objections from France’s Constitutional Court, which had first thrown it out, the French Senate has recently passed it, so that it is close to becoming law. It would empower a state agency – called Hadopi – to detect this sort of activity and, if two warnings to desist are ignored, pass on to French judges information about the offense for them to assign penalties, including fines, jail, and disconnection from the Net.

Ah, but can anyone ever stop truly determined Internet “pirates”? Le Monde reporter Maël Inizan now reports on another site now arising like a phoenix from The Pirate Bay’s ashes to save the cause of free downloading (Illegal downloading: a new site takes up the torch of The Pirate Bay). (more…)