Party of the Week: Pirate Party of Belgium

This week's Pirate Party of the Week is the Pirate Party of Belgium, which on June 13th will participate in national elections.

We encourage everyone to promote the link to the Questions and Answers, link to the website and Youtube/Facebook account of the Party of the Week and publish the questions/answers on your website/blog, on your Facebook page or print it out and show it to your friends.

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What are the core topics during the election campaign? Are there topics that are unique to the Pirate Party of the Belgium, something that distinguishes them from other Pirate Parties?

Our campaign slogan is "No evolution without the liberty to try"/"Geen evolutie zonder vrijheid te proberen"/"Pas d'évolution sans liberté d'essayer". As such, we've put forward three basic principles of the Pirate Movement, i.e. Open, Shared and Transparent. In addition, taking into account the "local" criticism regarding the fact we don't have a "real program", we've decided to publish one. We know that this is disruptive with what all other Pirate Parties did until now, but we took the decision to push the thing forward. Today we have a program composed of 42 points, mainly extending the principles and ideas found in the original Pirate Manifesto.

Tell us more about the inner structure of PP-Belgium.

We have two distinct organizations in Belgium. The Pirate Party is a factual association. The Black Pearl is a non for profit association which is used as a logistical and financial vehicle. In Belgium a NPO has to submit its member list every year and a FA doesn't have to. As such, we protect our members privacy using the FA and with the NPO we abide the Belgian laws on financial transparency of political parties.

The treasurer of the Pirate Party is the statutory chairman of the Black Pearl. All other Pirate Party co-chairmen, the secretary and deputies are members of the board, meaning that the Black Pearl is controlled and steered by the top level of the Pirate Party and not the reverse.

At Belgian level we have 11 electoral districts. In every district we have at least one local coordinator. Those coordinators interact with the local crews in a district and the people in charge of the regional coordination. The regional coordinators in turn link to the federal coordination team. Bear in mind that this is only a functional and not a hierarchical structure, everyone is free to get in touch and communicate with everyone.

We are also participation and merit minded. This means only people participating to at least 25% of the party's activities can apply and run as a candidate for a position. This applies to every single level, i.e. a crew, district, regional or federal level.

If you think 5 years ahead, what will be different compared to today's situation?

We think that the Pirate Movement faces, or will have to face, a couple of challenges which will make it stand or fall. The Movement kick started on a few strong points which got us a couple of elected people at different levels. This is a very good thing. At the other hand, we think that sooner or later the Pirate Movement will have to do its "coming out" and explicitly define what it wants for society as a whole. The elections worked out for the Swedish Pirate Party but didn't for our UK and CZ mates. It may be because downloading and surveillance cameras aren't of an immediate concern to most people? We are convinced that the Pirate Movement vehicles quite powerful and modern ideas, at least if one looks into what's beyond the initial Manifesto and tries to discover what ideas and philosophy subtends it. We are now engaged in a process of defining all of this more precisely. This is to show that there's more to find in the cookie jar than just patents and downloading (geeky?) stuff.

How do you manage to keep your financial balance? Did you have any special fund-raising methods? How can people support PP-Belgium ?

Everyone can support us by donating, affiliating, buying a t-shirt or pins, sending us a cradle of rhum ...

How many members does PP-Belgium have at the moment? Can foreigners become members of PP-Belgium ?

Everyone without distinction can become member of the Belgian Pirate Party. Even without paying a dime. Our structure is growing day by day. The electoral period is favorable to us in the sense that we benefit from media coverage and gain in publicity. As a result, new member requests are send to us every day. We estimate that we're about 2000 members/activists/supporters.

You can find more information on our website at http://www.pirateparty.be (Dutch & French website)

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• Pirate Party of Belgium Website: http://www.pirateparty.be
• Pirate Party of Belgium on Twitter: http://twitter.com/pp_belgium
• Pirate Party of Belgium on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pirateparty.be