Sweden will be holding its elections for the EU parliament on Sunday and it appears that the major established political parties here are softening their stances on intellectual property enforcement as the election approaches. Although it may actually be unrelated, one obvious explanation would be that polls are currently showing that the Swedish Pirate Party ("piratpartiet") can be expected to win one seat in the election, possibly two, out of 19 total for Sweden. This represents 5-8% of the Swedish popular vote, which I'm sure the major parties would like to have come to them rather than an upstart new party which has only been in one previous election and has not yet been seated in any governing body.

When piratpartiet first formed, I understood that part of their strategy was to define a very narrowly-focused platform so that they could magnify their influence by trying to be the swing group which the larger parties would need to court in order to establish a majority in the Swedish parliament. I didn't expect to see the other parties moving towards them for the EU parliament, though.