Support for Germany's upstart Pirate Party has risen strongly following a regional election breakthrough last month, a poll showed Wednesday, a performance that the party said shows it has arrived as a national force.

The Stern magazine poll put support for the Pirates, so far associated largely with calls for Internet freedom, at 8 percent. That would be enough, if there were an election, to give them seats in parliament and ahead of two of Germany's five established parties. Other surveys in recent days showed similar results.

The Pirates barely featured in national polling until they captured 8.9 percent of the vote in a mid-September state election in Berlin. That gave them their first seats in a regional legislature.

"Eight percent in a national poll is no longer one-day hype _ this is the start of fundamental political change," party leader Sebastian Nerz told reporters in Berlin. He insisted that the Pirates are "not a Net party _ we are a social and liberal party of fundamental rights."

It's far from clear whether the Pirates can keep up their performance, though.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has said their success in Berlin was a case of "classic protest" against established political parties.

The public hasn't yet had a chance to see the Pirates, who say they will webcast or publish all their activities in the new state legislature. Their leaders concede that the party still has considerable gaps in its program _ which it wants to fill through potentially cumbersome public consultation.

The party's approach "sometimes prevents us from being efficient," senior Pirate Marina Weisband said. "It isn't easy to be transparent, but that is the price we're prepared to pay for our internal democracy."

Asked about the party's approach to the top issue of the day, the Greek debt crisis, leader Nerz said that none of Germany's established parties yet have an answer to it, and neither do the Pirates _ although "we are discussing it."

Wednesday's poll put support for Merkel's conservative Union bloc at 31 percent and its slumping junior coalition partner, the Free Democratic Party, at a dismal 3 percent.

The opposition Social Democrats polled 28 percent and their traditional partners, the Greens, 17 percent. Those parties hope to form a future German government together, and already run several states _ though they suffered an embarrassing setback Wednesday in Berlin when efforts to build a regional coalition government foundered in a dispute over a planned new highway.

The survey put support for the third opposition group in parliament, the hard-left Left Party, at 7 percent.

The poll of 2,502 people, conducted Sept. 26-30, gave a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 points.

