The Pirate Bay has just launched a banner campaign to support the various Pirate parties participating in the European Parliament elections this week. The notorious torrent site is running localized ads, encouraging its millions of visitors to vote Pirate.

This week citizens across Europe will vote for who should represent them in the European Parliament, and in more than a dozen countries local Pirate Party members are present at the ballots.

During the last elections five years ago the Pirate Party surprised friend and foe by gaining two seats at the European Parliament. This year it is hoped that this success will be equaled or improved upon, a realistic aim according to current polls.

To increase the chance of a good result the Pirate parties have been on the campaign trail over the past few weeks. Today, these efforts are increasing thanks to a secret weapon no other party has access to: The Pirate Bay.

The Pirate parties struck a deal with the notorious torrent site which is now displaying localized banners in ten countries. The banners are featured on TPB’s homepage and replace the site’s iconic logo. This is in addition to a general Pirate Party banner that had been up and running for a few days already.

The prominent placement guarantees hundreds of thousands of eyeballs per day, some of which may end up in the voting booth. Rick Falkvinge, founder of the first Pirate Party, is delighted with the “pirate” partnership.

“I’m very happy that our brothers in arms are providing this great exposure to the political arm of the movement”, Falkvinge tells TorrentFreak.

“Most offline-born politicians wouldn’t realize that this exposure roughly equals buying the whole cover of every single newspaper in Europe, every day for the whole duration of the campaign.”

As in previous elections, the Pirate parties are calling for more transparency, better privacy protections, and decriminalization of file-sharing for personal use. The latter is of course a good match with TPB’s core philosophy.

And there’s another Pirate Bay connection in this year’s election race. In Finland, TPB co-founder and former site spokesman Peter Sunde is one of the candidates. Sunde is also calling for changes to current copyright laws.

“Non-commercial file sharing should of course become legal and protected, and we must re-think copyright all together. Copyright is not the thing that makes ARTISTS money, it’s only for their brokers and distributors,” Sunde told us previously.

While a few Pirates in Parliament might not get this done without help, the track record of the current Pirate MEPs, Christian Engström and Amelia Andersdotter, shows that a difference can be made.

Below are the banners for all the Pirate parties that are currently being promoted through The Pirate Bay in their respective countries. In a few days we will know whether the Pirates can continue their presence in the European Parliament and with how many.

UK



Germany



France



Sweden

The Netherlands



Finland



Czech Republic



Belgium



Greece



Spain



Luxembourg



Slovenia



Poland

