Pirate Party Sweden (PPSE) just finished their general assembly (GA) meeting, which took place online over the past few weeks. PPSE elected their first democratically chosen leader together with a vice-leader and a party-secretary. The GA also took a large decision to remove 561 specific political standpoints and retain only their political core program.

The new party leadership will step into their roles after almost a year and a half without a party leader. During this time the board of PPSE has taken a more active role and also delegated some leadership tasks to temporary positions. This was done in order to change some of the internal structure and statutes for new leadership.

The GA elected Magnus Andersson as their new leader, Mattias Bjärnemalm (Mab) as their vice-leader and Anton Nordenfur as party-secretary. Magnus has been a member several years but only been active in the party for the past two years and is still a new face to most members in the party. However, during this time he has been active in a wide range of positions and held many responsibilities that will come of use now.

“We need leadership. A new type of leadership, a leadership where there is a trust in our members to create participation. Where there is a possibility (both as an individual and organisation) to make mistakes and learn from them. Because what we are doing no party has attempted before: having a structure where every individual is a possible representative of the party and the politics we stand for. A leadership where we highlight and support groups and individuals doing good work whilst we still offer to help where needed. A leadership with focus on simple, functional structures so that we can focus on developing our party and politics.” – Magnus Andersson, PPSE leader

The second large decision the GA took was to remove 561 political standpoints (link in Swedish) that had previously been added to their political program. Over the past ten years PPSE have undergone various phases of broadening their political program. Many of these changes were implemented into their core political program (link in Swedish) whilst others remained more loose as political standpoints. However, over the years the approach has been changing and some of these political standpoints are very detailed whilst others are a bit odd in relation to the core political program.

Rather than attempting to go through each one with editing, mending, merging and even removing some, the members decided to remove everything and start with a clean slate. The best political statements will be worked over and implemented again over future GA’s but hopefully in a more coherent manner. For now the politics of PPSE consists of their core political program (3 sections with 12 parts in total underneath). Pirate Times will write about the remaining political policies in a future article.

Featured image: CC-BY-SA, Jonathan Rieder Lundkvist

About Josef Ohlsson Collentine

I’m a dual citizen (American/Swede) and try to integrate my reflections from a more global perspective if possible. I’m the organizational leader for Pirate Times and work actively to strengthen the pirate movement through this work as well as being the international contact for Piratpartiet (PPSE). Elected board member of PPSE for 2015-2018.
If you would like to ask me something I speak English, Swedish and Spanish. Find me on the links below

 

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Pirate Party Sweden (PPSE) just finished their general assembly (GA) meeting, which took place online over the past few weeks. PPSE elected their first democratically chosen leader together with a…