[pp.int.general] Upcoming elections in Germany

[Justus Römeth]

Just a short FIY:

It looks like the state parliament of North-Rhine-Westfalia is dissolving
itself, meaning there will be elections there within the next 60 days.

NRW is Germany's most populous state with 17 million inhabitants (more than
the Netherlands(!)). It is a mix of urban places like Cologne, Bonn,
Düsseldorf, and the formerly industrious Ruhr area (Dortmund, Essen,
Gelsenkirchen, Bochum, and Duisburg) along with some more rural areas with
some student and other midsized towns like Münster, Bielefeld, Paderborn,
Siegen, and Aix-la-chapelle. PPDE was polling at around 5-9% recently, so
there is a good chance of us making it above the 5% threshold.

This year was supposed to be pretty slow as far as elections were
concerned, with only the elections in the relatively small states Saarland
and Schleswig-Holstein coming up. Well, we were already pretty mobilized
and ready to help the pirates there, since both states are rather rural,
which makes the pirates few and far apart, but now it would be of utmost
importance to make it into the NRW parliament, and we do have good chances
of accomplishing that. This means that help from the surrounding countries
(France, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands) is very welcome to reach
that goal, of course. Since it is almost at the same time as the
Schleswig-Holstein election, it will likely cost us some helpers there, so
if pirates from Denmark (or Sweden on their way to buy cheap beer) can help
out there, too, it would be grand.

I think if we make it into the NRW parliament that would be a bigger event
than the Berlin election last year (whereas Saarland and Schleswig-Holstein
would have been about the same size, maybe a bit smaller). Our chances for
a lot of publicity there are good, and, just like Berlin, this would be at
the very least Europe-wide. So see if you can spare a weekend or two until
the elections are happening to help the pirates in NRW if you live closeby.

-J
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