The Berlin Pirates

No, Berlin has no new baseball team but a new party in the state parliament. Remember my blog about color coding? Last Sunday, a new color enriched Germany's party spectrum. In the Berlin election, the orange-colored Pirates starting from zero won 8.9% of the votes resulting in 15 seats in the state parliament.

Their slogan against the other parties: You have the answers, we have the questions. Apparently, voters also had more questions than they were given answers to these days. All the other parties lost in comparison with their expectations. In particular, the Liberals (yellow) have been marginalized to a mere 1.9% and will no longer be represented in Berlin's state parliament. The Pirates' program is rather scanty except for their precise demands: Free Internet for the people and pot legalization.

The established parties are distraught. The Social Democrats (red) intone that the Pirates are contentless, and Chancellor Merkel (black) dismisses their success as a classical protest. And so it is up to the Greens to moan. Once they were lined up against the establishment, now they are part of it.

Yellow is out, and orange is in. Above all, the revolution looks like vegetarians eating Green.

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