THE Pirate Party is fielding 42 candidates in the election in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) on May 13th. Few voters realise this number was chosen because it is the answer to the ultimate question, according to Deep Thought, a computer in Douglas Adams's “The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy”. Yet this party, say polls, will win nearly 10% of the vote in NRW, the most populous state (as it will in Schleswig-Holstein a week earlier). That puts it near the Greens and ahead of both the ex-communist Left Party and the Free Democrats, who are part of Germany's ruling coalition. If the party enters the Bundestag in next year's federal election, it could affect the make-up of the government.

The Pirates also have a new approach to politics. They grumble that old-fashioned politicians heed voters only when they stand for election. They want a high-bandwidth connection that is always on and carries messages from citizens to politicians at least as much as the other way. “Now you have to choose a party and a package of opinions. You throw your voice away for five years,” says Michele Marsching, the party's leader in NRW. Freedom in the digital world is held to be a fundamental right. Censorship and persecution of copyright violators are intolerable.

Germany is often said to be suffering from a democratic malaise. Broad-based parties like the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats are losing members. Voter turnout is falling. Citizens mobilise outside party structures against infrastructure projects; when it comes to the euro, they feel helpless. A poll in Der Spiegel says that 83% favour more direct participation.

The Pirates pose lots of interesting questions. Is “liquid democracy” workable? Is it good for politics? Will the Pirates survive as a force to be taken seriously? The answers are uncertain.

There have been embarrassments galore—hardly surprising in a party started by political tyros less than six years ago and growing at breakneck pace since it first won seats in Berlin in September. Its “transparency” fetish does not help. Prominent Pirates are prone to making alarming statements (the party's Berlin chief compared its rise to that of the Nazis). Rivals say its elected representatives in Berlin have been useless. Its NRW platform barely mentions the budget and debt burden, but the party favours erasing the list of dangerous dogs.

A more fundamental question is how to put the Pirates' principles into practice, which will become harder as they get closer to power. They deliberate on Twitter, Mumble (a version of Skype), Piratepad (a chatroom) and face to face. They distrust their leaders. Yet voters and journalists demand clear messages and rapid action. The Berliners set store by LiquidFeedback, a software programme that lets people vote on documents or delegate votes to proxies. This is a compromise between grass-roots and representative democracy, says Martin Haase, a “superdelegate” with lots of proxies. In Berlin office-holders must heed decisions from LiquidFeedback. Superdelegates are a parallel elite, who have greater legitimacy because their mandates can be revoked at any time. Some say that Mr Haase, a linguistics professor, is the most influential Pirate of all. LiquidFeedback matters less outside Berlin. But the Pirates have yet to invent easier methods. Party conventions, which all 27,000 members may attend, are unwieldy. Giving leaders more authority would be a top-down answer. “We have a lot of grassroots democracy but nothing that is really scalable,” says Pavel Mayer, a Berlin legislator. Pirates will grapple with this when they elect a new board at their convention on April 28th and 29th. Many members who flooded into the party after its success in Berlin have non-digital concerns. But here the Pirates are improvisers, sounding slightly barmy (the state should recognise marriages of more than two people), like other leftist parties or both at once (travel on public transport should be ticketless). There is an assumption that disagreements can be resolved by dialogue and voting. The implication, says Mr Marsching, is that parties could one day become obsolete.

Such musings trigger alarm. Without parties to mediate between citizens and the state, says Michael Lühmann of the Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, small, highly motivated groups can prosper at the expense of the many. The Pirates “lack a basic understanding that not everything is negotiable”, he says. This may be unfair: they fervently defend the constitution. They may be an anti-party party (as the Greens were) but they are not an anti-system party, says Christoph Bieber of the NRW school of governance.

The Pirates' rivals are starting to copy their methods. A group close to the Social Democrats recently rolled out D64, an internet policy platform, to “prepare Germany for digital democracy”. Christian Democrats followed suit with CNetz. If the copies are good enough, the Pirates themselves may become obsolete.