THE RISE AND FALL OF PIRATE POLITICAL PARTIES Abstract This paper was created as an aspiration to view the pirate movement as a predecessor and herald of the anti-establishment wave that followed on the political scenes of Western liberal democracies in the mid-2010s. Based on a brief history of pirate parties in the four countries that were considered relevant to the development of the pirate movement, it was determined that in each of them there was a sharp increase in the popularity of pirate