[pp.int.general] Political Party X (was: Uppsala Declaration)

[Ole Husgaard]

Max Lalouschek | Piratenpartei Österreichs skrev:
> There have been so many mails written, that it's impossible for me to 
> react on all of them.
>   
I have the same problem of too many mails to respond to now that I am
finally back home.

But I would like to respond to some of the major issues being raised:

- This is almost like the pirate manifesto, but only agreed by a few people.

No, this is NOT a manifesto. We were aware that a common manifesto would
be hard to agree on and that it would need a lot of discussion. So we
agreed only to a platform for the EU Parliament elections.

The manifesto is very important for us. We should get the discussions
for this restarted, as Carlos and others suggested. But the manifesto is
something that we should IMHO not rush, as it it way to important.
Instead we just settled for a "common platform" that we believe all the
EU parties will be able to agree to.

- This is binding to the parties.

This is only binding to the people who said they agree. I personally
agree, but it will not be binding to the danish PP until I discussed
this internally with my party and the local party agree. This is
something missing from the "common platform" that I think all of us
attending the Uppsala event agreed on: We cannot bind anybody else than
us attending. Also it was explicitly stated that the presentation of
this platform is left to the local parties.

I think we have many differences. These differences have to be
respected. When discussing the common platform we were careful to state
the final document in a way that we thought all the EU parties could
agree to.

- Joining another EU-Parl group would be bad.

If we get enough votes to form our own group that would be best. But if
not we could get better political influence by joining another group. We
would not be bound by it, as we can leave the group if we want. And the
group we (if needed) join do not support our issues we can leave it
again. This will help pressuring a larger group of parliamentarians to
support our issues in order to get our votes on issues where we do not
care in exchange for them voting for our issues.

Best Regards,

Ole Husgaard.

P.S: I really like all the opposition we see now. This is important. I
only hope that new discussions are concrete (as opposed to theoretical)
and make a starting point by quoting the text agreed on at the Uppsala
conference and stating what could be better.