Founded by computer geeks in Sweden in 2006 and now active in 33 countries, the Pirate Party is hoping to win over young, disaffected voters in Germany’s federal election on Sept. 27 with demands to reform copyright and patent laws along with their policies that oppose internet censorship and surveillance. But do the single-issue activists, with no stance on foreign policy or the economy, even have the faintest hope of overcoming the five percent hurdle needed to enter parliament?

This looks unlikely given the 0.9 percent of the vote they won at the European parliamentary elections in June.  Nonethless, the Piratenpartei with more than 8,000 members is the fastest growing party in Germany, a development partly sparked by the German parliament’s ratification of controversial legislation on blocking certain websites in a bid to fight child pornography.

Gero Neugebauer, political scientist at Berlin’s Free University, said the traditional parties’ failure to properly understand the internet may have put wind in the Pirates’ sails. “The large parties have treated the issue as if the only people using the internet are old men with lewd ideas who want to look at pornographic images or practice paedophilia,” Neugebauer said in a recent TV interview.  ”If the Pirate Party manages to make clear in society the conflict which they presently represent … then they definitely have the potential to get above the five percent hurdle,” he added.

Among the ranks of the Pirate Party is a former Social Democrat member of parliament — Joerg Tauss. He resigned under pressure in September amid an investigation into possession of child pornography by state prosectors. He denies any wrongdoing.  “The internet has been increasingly tightened in recent years and made into a civil rights-free zone,” Tauss said in parliament when the legislation was passed. 

Alongside traditional campaigning methods, the Pirate Party has taken to the streets setting up model living rooms inside transparent containers in public squares to protest against what they see as an increasingly Orwellian police state.  Support could come from younger voters, who have grown up with the internet, and who feel that established political parties are out of touch with their concerns.

“I want to be able to exchange music on the internet with my friends for free,” Florain Bischof, Pirate Party candidate for Berlin says on student networking site studiVZ. One of the party’s main policies is an easing of copyright laws.

Germany’s mainstream polling institutes do not include the Pirates as a separate party in their survey and it is not clear how popular the party would be among the population at large. So the question remains: how successful has the party been in shedding its image as a bunch of male software engineers getting stroppy about their surfing rights? And in Germany’s greying population, with voters 60 and over making up 30 percent of the rapidly ageing electorate, is a campaign targeted at gamers and those who download music doomed to fall flat?

PHOTOS: A member of the Pirate Party (above) walks in front of the Reichstag as part of its campaign for the September general election in Berlin. The Piratenpartei Deutschland was founded in Germany on September 10, 2006, following a model of Swedish analog Piratpartiet. REUTERS/Thomas Peter Below, Joerg Tauss. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch

If anything projects a sense of “what me, worry?” in the Ehud Olmert “travelgate” corruption case, it’s this photo, distributed by the Government Press Office, of the Israeli prime minister paying a visit on Thursday to Sderot, a  town hit repeatedly by Hamas rockets before and during the Gaza war he helped to orchestrate.

“The Beverly Hills Hotel and Bungalows” reads the logo on his jacket. 

In a case revolving around Olmert’s foreign travels and stays in luxury hotels before he became prime minister, Israel’s attorney-general plans to summon the veteran politician and his attorneys next month to give him a chance to explain why he should not be indicted.

The Justice Ministry suspects that Olmert, during trips abroad as mayor of Jerusalem and as a cabinet minister from 2002 to 2006, double-billed for plane tickets and used the extra money for family vacations and upgrades. In a separate case, a U.S. businessman said he handed Olmert envelopes stuffed with cash and told a court about his penchant for top-class hotels and fine cigars.

Olmert has denied any wrongdoing and no criminal charges have been filed. He resigned as prime minister in September, saying he would fight the allegations. He remains caretaker prime minister until a new government is formed after Israel’s February 10 election in which he is not running.

It is not just eastern Germany that has a problem fighting far-right militants.

The stabbing of a German police chief on his doorstep in southern Germany, which prosecutors suspect is a revenge attack by neo-Nazis angry about a crackdown on their activities, has exposed the uncomfortable reality that western Germany has troubles of its own.

The attack has shocked Germany and rekindled a fierce debate about how to tackle neo-Nazis and whether to ban the far-right National Democratic Party (NPD).

But most of all, it exposes as a myth the belief many western Germans cling to — that the far-right is a problem confined mainly to former Communist eastern states where unemployment is high and young men are lured into the far-right scene due to a lack of any other prospects.

The assault on the police man took place in Passau, a picturesque city in Bavaria, the rich, southern state which Chancellor Angela Merkel has described as a model for Germany.

In fact, Bavaria has a long had close ties with the far right — starting with Hitler’s Munich “beer hall” putsch in 1923.  Support for the NPD is strong in some areas and it was in Passau that a neo-Nazi tried to place a flag with a swastika on the coffin of a far-right activist at his funeral a few months ago.

The northern Bavarian town of Graefenberg has been waging its own campaign against neo-Nazis who hold regular marches through the town to protest against a local authority decision barring them from gathering at a German war memorial.

Many German politicians have been reluctant to acknowledge the scale of the problem posed by far-right sympathisers, despite warnings from the country’s top policeman and from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution — that neo-Nazis are becoming more violent.

What is more, attacks on foreigners occur every month and get much less attention in the German media than the weekend assault on the Passau policeman, an establishment figure.

If politicians fail to recognise the problem, Germany risks damaging its image abroad as memories linger of World War Two and the Holocaust.

He may have died in a car crash last month whilst drunk, but Austrian rightist Joerg Haider is not gone.

Haider, who was enmeshed in nearly every part of Austrian political life, is now being hailed for his efforts to help two Austrian hostages being held in the Sahara months before his death.

According to a newly-published e-mail, Haider asked the son of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in March for help in freeing Andrea Kloiber and Wolfgang Ebner, who disappeared in February while on holiday in Tunisia. They are believed to have been held by al Qaeda’s North African wing.

The hostages were released last week, several months after Haider wrote to his close friend Saif al-Islam Gaddafi. The Austrian Foreign Ministry said Libya only helped in initial negotiations but not the eventual release.

Whether Haider’s contribution was decisive or not, the news has only added to his image as a “hero of the people”.

The daily Oesterreich, which printed extracts from the e-mail, has already published a DVD of Haider’s life and romantic images of him dressed in traditional Austrian costume, looking out over the mountains of Carinthia, where he was provincial governor. Some 25,000 people attended his memorial service in Klagenfurt last month.

Many did not seem to think his divisive anti-immigrant rhetoric was much of an issue and were fiercely loyal towards Haider, one of Austria’s few internationally recognised figures.

Even Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, a Social Democrat who openly opposed many of Haider’s views, has admitted that his opponent had enormous ability to reach out to people.

South African President Thabo Mbeki did not get to bask long in the success of securing Zimbabwe’s power-sharing deal before finding himself in the firing line again at home.

Now his most strident foes - who can be found within his ruling African National Congress - say he should be pushed from office after a judge made clear he saw political interference in the corruption trial against ANC leader and longstanding Mbeki rival Jacob Zuma.

The plan by prosecutors to challenge the court’s decision to throw out the trial looks set to further stoke political tensions. The ANC executive committee is due to meet this weekend.

Zuma has said the ANC should stay united ahead of the election in April, when Mbeki has to step down anyway, and was quoted as saying that wasting energy on trying to force the president out sooner was like “beating a dead snake”.

South Africa’s economy has grown steadily with Mbeki in power, although that growth is slowing now, but the president’s critics say only the rich have benefited and accuse him of failures over everything from power shortages to xenophobic attacks to crime to AIDS.

Until recently, Mbeki’s soft diplomatic tack on Zimbabwe had been branded a failure by many too.

Has Mbeki had a fair hearing? What will his legacy be as the man who followed Nelson Mandela to the presidency? Should he go sooner rather than later?

What do you think?

“Should I wait until she’s finished?” asks a soldier from an Italian Alpine regiment, in their distinctive feathered Tyrolean-style hat, to her police colleagues as they patrol an area of Turin notorious for addicts known as “Toxic Park” and see a woman shooting up.

Incidents like this one reported in Corriere della Sera newspaper seem to support Italian police unions’ doubts about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s initiative, which began this week, to put 3,000 soldiers on the streets of 10 cities for the next six months to help the police fight a supposed crime wave. Some police officers believe military personnel, even those hardened by peace missions abroad, do not have the training needed to fight crime.

But as the first few hundred soldiers took to the streets this week — wearing barrack-dress uniform with sidearms only for street patrols, but camouflage combat gear and rifles for guard duty on “sensitive” targets like embassies and railway stations — many city mayors hailed the exercise as a success. The military man in charge of the operation, Giuseppe Valotto, said the public reaction had been “incredibly positive” and helped improve citizens’ perception of their own safety. Soldiers even notched up a few “collars” in their first few days on joint patrol with the police, hauling in 12 African immigrants in Naples accused of faking fashion brands, chasing a thief through the streets of Bari and nabbing a man in Milan who had snatched the takings of a bar from the till.

Being style-conscious Italians, of course, the troops carried off their street duties with the requisite swagger and Rome’s right-wing mayor, Gianni Alemanno, who has worried about them scaring off the tourists, appeared taken with the Grenadiers of Sardinia helping out with guard duties in Rome, saying: “They looked like they were out of a film, really perfect, they have a great image.”

But the political opposition, and the media, has asked if it is really necessary to draft in a token number of soldiers in a country that already has 230,000 police and carabinieri, and where the crime rate is not alarmingly high compared to the rest of Europe anyway. A new study by research centre Censis released this week shows, for example, that Italy has the lowest murder rate of the biggest European countries and one which is falling already. One union leader suggested the military should be drafted into Italian building sites instead to combat a growing cause of death among Italians — fatal accidents at work, where Italy ranks top in Europe, according to Censis.

The opposition also points out that Berlusconi has mobilised the military while simultaneously reducing funding for the police in the budget.

The foreign press appears sceptical too, with the Financial Times saying in a comment piece this week that Italy’s new conservative government might to well to focus instead on combatting corruption, where the country has the worst record in the European Union apart from Greece, according to Transparency International’s global corruption Index. Forbes magazine called the operation a “diversion tactic” by Berlusconi to shift the focus away from the country’s sagging economy, which it said has the lowest growth in the euro zone and is heading for recession.

But, as often seems to happen in Italy, Berlusconi comes in for fiercer criticism from the foreign press than from the domestic audience. While putting soldiers on the streets to combat a crime wave of dubious proportions might spark protest in some countries, so far it has been limited to a few banners and handbills in the capital saying “Free Rome”.