Is there a Pirate Nation, and how populist is it? The case of the Czech Pirates

This article examines how the Czech Pirate Party engages with the concepts of “nation” and “people” to assert its liberal and anti-populist stance in the context of rising populist, nationalist and conservative discourses in Czechia since the 2015 refugee crisis. Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities, Michael Billig’s notion of banal nationalism and work on populism, anti-populism and technopopulism, the study combines qualitative thematic analysis of speeches and statements published on the party’s website (2021–2023) with an examination of 101 posts from its 2021 Instagram election campaign. This allows us to trace how the party constructs national identity and addresses “the people” across institutional and informal arenas of political communication. We argue that the Pirates articulate Czech national identity through what we term “banal Westernist nationalism”, framing Czechia as a rights-based part of “the West”. At the same time, while rejecting opponents’ populism, they deploy their own populist rhetoric, presenting a Western-oriented people opposed to corrupt elites and demanding expert-led governance. We therefore characterise the party’s political style as “anti-populist technopopulism” and discuss its implications for understanding how liberal, pro-European actors in Central and Eastern Europe navigate the intertwined terrains of nationalism and populism.