Czech Pirate Party

The Czech Pirate Party (Czech: Česká pirátská strana [ˈtʃɛskaː ˈpɪraːtskaː ˈstrana]) often known simply as the Pirates (Piráti [ˈpɪraːcɪ]) is a liberal progressive political party in the Czech Republic, founded in 2009. The party was founded as a student-driven grassroots movement campaigning for political transparency, civil rights and direct democracy.

The party's program focuses on safeguarding of civil liberties from state or corporate power via government transparency and public participation in democratic decision making. It aims to achieve its agenda by enacting laws for political accountability, anti-corruption, lobbying transparency, tax avoidance prevention, simplifying of state bureaucracy through e-government, supporting small and medium-sized business, funding of local development, promotion of environmental protection, consumer protection and sustainability. The party also aims to reform laws on copyright, financial markets and banking, taxation of multinational corporations, and while it is a pro-European party, it aims to address the perceived democratic deficit in the European Union by decentralization and subsidiarity.

The party contested the 2021 Czech parliamentary election as part of the alliance Pirates and Mayors with the Mayors and Independents party. The alliance gained 37 seats, out of which four are Pirate MPs, and joined the governing Cabinet of Petr Fiala with Spolu. The Pirate party is represented by five Members of the Senate of the Czech Republic, the most recently elected being Adéla Šípová and David Smoljak in 2020 and Lukáš Wagenknecht in 2018. That same year, the party entered a number of municipal assemblies and formed a governing coalition in the Prague City Assembly, with Zdeněk Hřib becoming the Mayor of Prague. In the 2019 European election, the party gained three MEPs, joined the Greens–European Free Alliance parliamentary group and campaign leader Marcel Kolaja was elected one of fourteen Vice-Presidents of the European Parliament. The party holds 99 out of 675 seats in regional councils since the October 2020 elections.