Catalan Pirates run for Spanish Congress

Today, 20th of November, is election day in Spain. The new Prime Minister will be decided and probably the right-wing candidate Mariano Rajoy (PP) will win by a landslide, ousting the party in power since 2004 (PSOE). However, these elections are also important for the International Pirate movement, since they are the first general elections in Spain with Pirate candidates for both Congress and Senate.

And they're not only Pirates, but very exceptional candidates as well. For instance, the head for Barcelona's constituency is no other than Josep Jover. He is a famous lawyer in Spain for many reasons, but most notably because he managed to overturn in Brussels the Spanish digital tax: an arbitrary charge on all digital equipment, collected to be paid as a compensation to Spanish artists, as for their hypothetical losses due to what they call "piracy".

However, the fight for this election has been tough. Let's not forget that the current parlimentary parties modified the Electoral Law to try to prevent small parties from competing with them. They did so by forcing them to obtain supporting signatures from 0.1% of the census, just to be allowed to run in the elections.

It would seem that the mainstream parties were worried that the #spanishrevolution movement would take away votes from their long-stablished bipartisan system. And they did have reasons to worry! PIRATA.CAT, the Catalan Pirate Party, created Joavalo.org, an online tool designed to speed up the collection of all these signatures and, to prove true to their convictions, released it freely so that all other small parties could use it as well. The result was that PIRATA.CAT obtained some media attention, and twice the necessary signatures.

It was not the first time the Catalan Pirate Party managed to surpass expectations. In their first elections, being only three months old and with no media presence, they obtained 1.000 more votes than one of the most media-sponsored novel parties in Spain, UPyD. In their second elections, nine months after that, they managed to obtain two City Hall councillors, still with no media presence whatsoever.

The reasons for their social support are no surprise: their use of internet-based tools and environments. PIRATA.CAT is very active in Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other forms of social media. Their weblog is constantly updated, and they have a full array of promotional videos (you can get a sample here ). In this field, they are no match for the other traditional parties.

In fact, this very week they managed to be Trending Topic in Spain with the hashtag #votopirata ("I vote Pirate"). This was a great opportunity to show to newcomers the Pirate ideology and to reach and inform some undecided voters. It proved to be a great success: visits to PIRATA.CAT's pages increased dramatically the day after, and kept increasing every day.

And this is why in this elections, for the first time, Spanish media has begun to show some interest, interviewing Pirate candidates, and discussing about Pirate ideas. In a time when a lot of Spaniards are asking for real democracy, the thought that Internet could provide it sounds appealing to many. And the media can no longer ignore it.

It has still to be seen what the results of this new tendency will be today. However, no one can deny that the Catalan Pirates are here to stay.