It’s 5 PM in Prague, and Czechia’s deputy prime minister for digitalization is dancing alone onstage to a soundtrack of chest-rattling bass, his dirty-blond dreadlocks swinging down his back. A former trance DJ and punk-band frontman, 44-year-old Ivan Bartoš is one of the most recognizable figures in the Pirate Party, a political movement that grew around torrent-sharing site The Pirate Bay in the mid-2000s and advocated for freedom online, privacy, and a citizen-controlled web.
Since 2009, Pirates have held parliamentary seats in the European Union, which has become the internet’s de facto regulator. In the past five years, MEPs (members of European Parliament) have wrangled over laws that compel encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp to let their users communicate across different apps, banned certain uses of AI, and imposed billions of dollars in fines on Big Tech companies like Apple and Google. Yet even as the world has woken up to threats facing the internet, the cyber-literate Pirate Party has spent long periods struggling for relevance, beset by infighting and functioning as fringe voices while better-known but less tech-savvy politicians jostle for the spotlight to take on Big Tech.
But in Czechia (also known as the Czech Republic) it’s been a different story. Under Bartoš’ leadership, the Czech Pirate Party sits in coalition government and controls the ministries of regional development and legislation, as well as the foreign ministry, a high-profile gig as the eastern European country looks anxiously toward the war in Ukraine. For four and a half years, a Pirate sat as mayor of the capital, Prague.
At the end of April, Czech Pirates gathered in a riverside skatepark in the capital to launch their European election campaign in front of a cluster of TV cameras. A small crowd sipped pints of beer as Bartoš—a decade sober, despite his antics—attempted to persuade a member of his campaign staff to join him dancing on stage.
Despite the unconventional atmosphere, the proposition was a straightforward one. The Pirates believe that European politics needs online experts like them around the decision table, and that a movement whose leaders were once sentenced to jail deserves another shot at trying to save the internet.
As Pirates across the EU prepare for this week's European Parliament elections, they have been looking to Bartoš to understand how they, too, can convince millions of eligible voters that an ideology born in the early aughts is still relevant. “We understand the issues of the digital world,” says Bartoš, sitting in a deck chair and pulling out a cigarette between visits to the stage. To him, only the Pirates are qualified to help Europe turn the information society into a net positive. “Now you've got information everywhere but you are not able to derive it into something that actually helps improve your life.”
I must have been 14 when a boy I knew through school explained how I could get all the music I ever wanted, for nothing. As I sat at my parents’ microwave-sized computer, he painstakingly described the basics of The Pirate Bay over MSN Messenger. It was 2005. YouTube was yet to launch, Spotify didn’t exist, Apple was charging almost $1 a song through iTunes.
The Pirate Bay offered an alluring alternative—a search engine of links to torrent files that enabled users to share movies and music for free. It soon became one of the world’s most visited websites, making it trivially easy for millions to pirate unlimited free music, movies, and games. And it started a global debate about who was going to control this still newish thing called the internet.
This all started with The Pirate Bureau (Piratbyrån), a group of friends and file-sharing activists who would drive around Sweden in an old bus spreading their message: that the web is built on collective experiences and culture should be free to be copied, shared, and remixed by all.
The Pirate Bay was just one of several projects the Bureau launched that reflected its philosophy, which it called Kopimi (pronounced “copy me”). But in 2004, the group decided the site deserved special attention. It was spun out as its own organization and taken over by three nerdy Swedes: Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm, and spokesperson Peter Sunde. They beefed up the site’s ability to handle enormous amounts of traffic and (controversially) added advertising to recoup some of the costs. “The purpose was to make it … the biggest site in the world,” Carl Lundström, a controversial businessman who helped finance the site, would later testify in court.
The trio appeared to revel in taunting music industry and Hollywood executives, who were apoplectic with rage watching how their products were, in their view, being ransacked. Sunde was unapologetic, painting the Pirate cause as noble—they were simply using technology to spread free culture. The group replied to legal threats with trolling. When Swedish authorities raided The Pirate Bay servers, the pirates resurrected the site and hid messages in their website’s domain names exhorting copyright authorities to “bite.my.shiny.metal.ass.”
In the midst of the copyright wars, Swedish IT entrepreneur Rick Falkvinge decided to launch a political movement that could further the Pirates’ cause. Inspired by The Pirate Bay and The Pirate Bureau’s ability to talk back to the copyright industry, Falkvinge launched the first Pirate Party website on January 1, 2006.
Falkvinge quit his job and took out a bank loan to help support the party, but he had mixed feelings about the launch even at the time. He didn’t particularly want to abandon his IT career for what felt like a huge risk. But he also felt like he owed it to a copy-share culture he felt deeply embedded in. Plus there was more than just copyright at stake. “Copyright had essentially become a passport to the internet as a whole,” he tells me. “We were sharing music in private communications and the only way to catch that, if you wanted to discover it, was to start eavesdropping on all [our messages].” He thought politicians were out of their depth and that they didn’t really have time to get into the details. “The only way to get their attention,” Falkvinge believed, “was to make it personal for them and go straight for their jobs.”
For Falkvinge, the mission was to prevent the government from using the internet to create a dystopia that would take centuries to undo. He felt that Swedes were yet to wake up to the fact the internet as they knew it was under attack. That changed in 2009, when a Stockholm court sentenced all three founders of The Pirate Bay to one year in jail. Swedes were outraged at the heavy-handedness, remembers Falkvinge. Not only were Sunde, Neij, and Svartholm handed prison time—they were also instructed to pay damages of 30 million kronor (then $3.6 million) to some of the world’s biggest entertainment companies, including Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Bros. “People did not feel that the establishment was really threatening this culture of sharing, collaboration and living online until that verdict was handed down,” says Falkvinge. Afterward, Pirate Party membership quadrupled in a week. Less than two months later, Swedes were handed another outlet to express their anger in the form of a European Union election.
EU elections are typically lackluster affairs—at least half of Europeans don’t bother voting for who they want to represent them in the European Parliament, one of the three institutions that governs the club of 27 countries, and the only one that is directly elected. But it was the moment Falkvinge had been waiting for. “We were ready to absorb all of this public outrage,” he says. The Pirate brand was so strong in Sweden that some of the party’s election posters simply read: “The Pirate Party: We exist.”
Swedes gave the Pirate Party 7 percent of their vote, enough for them to send a representative to the European Parliament. Falkvinge remembers the wall of paparazzi capturing the Pirates’ rum-fueled election night party, and photos from that evening show him ecstatically embracing Christian Engström, who was about to become the party’s man in Brussels. The result was validation of the idea that the world was in need of a new, cyber-literate force in politics. “It was a huge victory showing that the net generation didn’t have to take policymaking bullshit sitting down,” Falkvinge later wrote on his blog.
More Pirate Parties, modeled on the Swedish originals, began to spring up across Europe—by the end of 2009 there were offshoots in Czechia, Luxembourg, and the UK. In September 2011, the Pirates surprised Germany by winning 15 seats in the Berlin senate, campaigning for free internet, free public transport, and copyright reform.
But success for the Swedish Pirates was fleeting. In 2011, a rule change entitled the Swedish Pirates to two European representatives instead of one, and Engström was joined in Brussels by 24-year-old fellow Pirate, Amelia Andersdotter. Party strategists believed the pair would make a nice contrast. Engström was from the IT-guy wing of the party—more engineer than buccaneer is how WIRED described him at the time—while Andersdotter, with her undercut and thick dark fringe, reflected the group’s younger, more alternative streak.
The pair had some success—including working with hacker group Anonymous to oppose the international anti-piracy treaty known as ACTA. But their differences soon came to the surface. “It was like watching a traffic accident in slow motion,” one of Engström’s assistants, Henrik Alexandersson, wrote of their term years later. Engström started publicly calling Andersdotter “Lisbeth Salander,” after the troubled hacker in the Swedish novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. In return, Andersdotter labeled Engstrom an “incompetent old man.” Pirates at home in Sweden decried the party’s first foray into Brussels as “an undignified circus,” and at the next EU election, in 2014, both of them lost their seats.
That pattern repeated itself elsewhere. In Berlin, the party became embroiled in a string of scandals as its eccentric candidates clashed. The Pirate ethos of transparency—which meant making internal debates visible to followers in online forums—ended up broadcasting their problems as well as their policies. “The amount of infighting is the same in most political parties,” says Mattias Bjärnemalm, who will make his fourth attempt at being elected to the European Parliament in this week’s election. “Most parties are wise enough not to have that infighting on Twitter.”
With 13 years of service, Bjärnemalm is a veteran in a party where people don’t tend to last long. Unlike other, older political movements, the Pirate Party can’t offer former politicians jobs in party-affiliated foundations once they leave politics, so there’s little incentive for Pirates to stick around if they lose influence, he says. “That means when Pirates get unhappy about a current development in the party, they’re more likely to do what we would call a ‘rage quit.’”
Take Felix Reda, a German Pirate, who was the party’s sole representative in Brussels between 2014 and 2019. He led the EU’s negotiations on updating copyright rules and was a prolific opponent of new requirements for companies like YouTube to scan all uploads for copyright, a practice branded as “upload filters,” which drew thousands of Germans to the streets in protest. Politico named him one of the 40 MEPs (out of 700) who mattered most in his five-year term; the list also recognized his efforts to be transparent, how he published details of every meeting taken by his office using an open source tool. But back home in Germany, his party was becoming embroiled in scandal.
In 2016, grisly news emerged that one of Germany’s most prominent Pirates had murdered a younger colleague before taking his own life. Three years later, following a bitter debate about the German Pirates’ failure to remove a candidate accused of sexual harassment, Reda posted a video to X announcing he was done. “Vote for a party that is committed to opposing upload filters,” he said. “But don’t vote for the Pirates.”
The scandals marked the downfall of the party’s German outpost, which is yet to win back their seats in Berlin. Especially in Germany, the disappointment with the movement was palpable. People were defecting, often publicly, in droves. Pirates were meant to be a cyber-literate force that would protect the internet from sliding into dystopia. Instead, as the party was distracted by bickering, power online was being concentrated in the hands of a few giant tech companies.
Yet there had been flashes of promise. Although it ended badly, Reda’s term had demonstrated how effective Pirates’ could be at whipping up interest in areas of internet policy that might have been otherwise ignored. And in Czechia, the Pirates were about to discover an election-winning formula.
One of the first things Markéta Gregorová ever says to me is that she doesn’t do small talk. The Czech Pirate Party MEP does not want to chat about the 40 minutes it took me to find her office in the European Parliament’s warren of gray hallways. She does not want to entertain any conversation about the giant Dumbledore poster pinned above her desk. Gregorová is 31, with a penchant for matching her bright red hair to whatever else she is wearing. Today, it’s a red dress. The next time we meet, she’s in pink.
As a teenager, growing up in what she describes as a poor family in a poor city, it was Gregorová’s liberal views that first drew her to the party. “On the Czech political spectrum, there is no liberal party apart from the Pirates,” she explains. “If you want the same rights for LGBT+ people as heterosexuals, we are the only ones who are relevant in Czechia.”
When I ask Gregorová about her work, she doesn’t mention copyright, the party’s founding campaign issue. Instead, she talks about the EU’s relationship with its eastern neighbors, such as Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. For Gregorová, the party’s ideology is baked into the way she does politics, not the subjects she focuses on. Pirates make policy based on evidence, whatever the subject, she explains. “We claim we are not on the left or the right, but we are moving forward—so it’s very future-oriented policies that are just data-based.” When I suggest that most politicians would say their policies are based on data and evidence, she shoots back. “They might say it, but they don’t do it. I’m negotiating with many political parties here every day, and all of them are basing their decisions only on ideology.”
But ideology was helping the Czech Pirates rise to prominence. As scandals engulfed the Swedes and the Germans, the Czech branch of the party positioned itself to fill the progressive hole in the country’s politics, while rallying against corruption in established parties. That approach resonated. Positioned as the liberal opposition to populist Prime Minister Andrej Babiš, the Pirates had their most successful European election result ever in 2019. Gregorová became one of three Czech Pirates elected to the European Parliament. In 2021, the party came third in the national elections. In typical Pirate style, the party did not agree to join the coalition government without the blessing of its members. In November, an (online) poll was held, with 82 percent of 1,000 Pirate members voting in favor of the idea that their party was ready for power.
For the first time ever, success at home was twinned with success in Brussels. There were now four Pirate representatives in the EU’s lawmaking center, one German and three Czechs. But the Pirate MEPs were split. Some, like Gregorová, focused on foreign affairs and issues that had never historically been a priority for the Pirate Party. Others, like Patrick Breyer—the Party’s sole German MEP—stuck closer to their roots.
Breyer, who is stepping down next month—to spend more time with his family, he says—has spent the past five years vocally opposing government attempts to increase surveillance. He rallied colleagues against a bill designed to scan encrypted messages for child sex abuse material, describing the proposal as an existential threat to encryption and churning out memes branding the Swedish Commissioner championing the bill, Ylva Johansson, as a sinister and surveillance-hungry “Big Sister.” In debates around the EU’s AI Act, he lobbied against “flawed” facial recognition technology becoming the basis for mass surveillance.
One of the party’s biggest challenges has been to define its position on American Big Tech companies, considered the digital villain du jour in many corners of Brussels. When the Pirates started, governments were considered the real threat to freedom online. This was the era of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Companies like Google and Facebook were still scrappy startups.
Even as concerns mounted that Big Tech was not only sullying democracy but also marginalizing their European competitors, Pirates often found themselves allied with the world’s biggest companies instead of working against them. Meta executives share Breyer’s reservations against the child abuse bill, due to the impact it would have on platforms like WhatsApp. Five years ago, YouTube had also opposed the copyright reforms in step with Felix Reda. Falkvinge, the party’s founder, remembers the Pirates fighting side by side with Microsoft on net neutrality regulation. That collaboration has put the Pirates out of step with the current mood in Brussels. Instead, commissioners like Thierry Breton and Margrethe Vestager have become the faces of Europe’s Big Tech crackdown. “It’s true that occasionally netizen interests overlap with industry’s,” Breyer says, denying there has ever been collaboration. “I fought to ban surveillance advertising in the Digital Services Act, much to their dismay. I criticized YouTube over their anti-adblock war.”
The Big Tech debate is forcing the party to reckon with its libertarian faction, who are much more comfortable rallying against new laws than pushing for them. Czech Pirate and MEP Marcel Kolaja’s support for the Digital Markets Act, which attempts to break up the tightly-controlled digital empires the world’s biggest companies have built online, would have baffled many of the party’s early members. The Pirates were the ones who pushed for new interoperability rules to be included, meaning, in theory, a WhatsApp user should be able to exchange messages with another person using Signal, says Breyer, who also supported the bill. “We’ve been amazingly influential seeing that we just have four MEPs,” he says.
Outside the skatepark in Prague, on a scrubby patch of grass, Bartoš leans back into his deck chair as he tries to impress on me that Pirates are not your regular stiff politicians. From the campaign launch unfolding behind us, that’s pretty obvious. Yes, there are long speeches and polite rounds of applause. But there are also gangs of shirtless skateboarders, a blue-haired rapper, rainbow banners showing our solar-powered future, and references to the online forums where party members can vote on new policies or demand new leadership.
He disagrees that the broadening of the Pirates’ focus has diluted its identity. “We cannot be a single issue party,” he insists. Instead, he compares the Pirates’ evolution to Europe’s Greens, which started as a grassroots movement built around a single issue: the environment. Now the Greens are applying their original values to everything from housing to energy, as they sit in coalition governments in Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Austria. Although the Pirates “don’t preach” like the Greens, he says, “we’re doing the same journey they did a while ago.”
The Czech branch demonstrates the Pirates’ potential—how an internet-first ideology can be woven into national politics—but it is also a microcosm of the party’s problems. Like other Pirates before it, the Czechs suffer from internal bickering, factionalism, and claims of sexual harassment. Former campaign manager Šárka Václavíková has spoken publicly about her decision to leave the party and her police complaint against a fellow party member for what she describes as stalking and psychological abuse. Over Zoom from her new home in Italy, she says sexual harassment of women was systemic before she left last year—a claim the party strongly denies. “Isolated incidents can, of course, happen, just as in society or any other party. However, if we had any information about such incidents, we would take immediate action,” party spokesperson Lucie Švehlíková told WIRED.
But Václavíková says she’s also disappointed with the direction of the party as a whole. “There are two factions in the Pirate Party,” she declares. There are the centrists, the people who want to appeal to everyone and are disowning the party’s Pirate Bay roots in the process. Václavíková says she identified with the other faction, whom she calls “the real pirates.” “For us,” she says, “the ideology of transparent policy and privacy, and also human rights, are more important than just gaining more power for our own profit.”
So far, Bartoš has prevented these issues from tearing the party apart. Part of why he has lasted so long, surviving a series of leadership challenges (including from Gregorová), is because he can clearly describe what makes the Pirates’ outlook different. Across Europe, other Pirates are still struggling to define what a better future—with more technology, not less—would actually look like. When I sign into a Zoom call with Tommy Klein, political adviser to the Pirates in Luxembourg, he is sitting in front of a poster emblazoned with the phrase “Save Our Internet.” When I ask how exactly the internet needs saving, he replies without enthusiasm that the poster is old. “It’s from the 2018 election,” he says.
Under Bartoš, however, the Czech Pirates have found a way to articulate a utopian vision of a technology-infused future that means more than just reducing Big Tech’s influence on the European internet. Like the Pirate Bureau 20 years ago, the Czech Pirates also have a bus—really more of a camper van—that carries illustrations of their message. There is a sun, with rays resembling internet nodes. Wind turbines and solar farms grow out of rolling pink hills. Slogans like “Girl Power” and “Tolerance” hover over people doing peace signs and smiling through heart-shaped glasses. In Bartoš, the original Pirate vision for an alternative technology-enabled future still lingers. “I believe that we can save the planet and society through technology,” he declares from his deck chair. Whether that optimism is still applicable, 20 years later, is up to the voters to decide.
Correction: 7/6/2024, 18.45PM BST: This story previously stated that Czechia was formerly known as the Czech Republic. In fact, Czechia is the official short form of Czech Republic.
