Sweden’s Pirate Party, which wants an internet filesharing free-for-all, is one of the surprise entrants to the European Parliament after winning 7.4 per cent of the vote.

The party, which also wants to beef up internet privacy, was founded in January 2006 and quickly attracted members angered by Swedish laws that criminalise filesharing and authorise the monitoring of e-mails. Its membership shot up after a court in Stockholm sentenced four men in April to a year in jail for running one of the world’s biggest filesharing sites, the Pirate Bay. Voters had their revenge last night by electing at least one of the Pirate Party as an MEP.

“When the verdict was announced at 11.00am, we had 14,711 members,” said Rick Falkvinge, the party’s founder. “We tripled in a week, becoming the third-biggest party in Sweden in terms of numbers. All of a sudden we were everywhere.”

In Sweden’s general election in 2006 the Pirate Party won only 0.6 per cent of the vote.

“They have been very lucky because the Pirate Bay verdict came at the same time as the start of the election campaign, but I think the Pirate Party had the potential to grow anyway,” said Ulf Bjereld, a political scientist at Gothenburg University.

“The Pirate Party has taken advantage of a new cleavage in Swedish politics, about civil liberties, about who should have the right to decide over knowledge, and that’s not a left-right cleavage,” he said.

“The traditional parties have been sleeping, they have underestimated the political potential in these issues.”

The typical Pirate Party supporter is a young, male internet buff. “It’s a ‘geek’ party,” said Brian Levinsen, a 31-year-old member at a recent campaign meeting in Stockholm.

There were some other surprises elsewhere, not least in Latvia. Voters in the European country worst hit by the economic crisis turned back to their last Communist leader in protest at the government’s handling of the slump. Alfreds Rubiks, 73, a veteran politician who served three years in jail for trying to topple the first democratic government in Latvia in 1991, was elected in a wave of support for the Baltic state’s pro-Russian party leader.