OPINION: Why I registered as a candidate for Sweden's new Folklistan party

The truth is I put myself forward as a candidate, and have now it seems been registered, simply out of professional curiosity.

As a journalist, I wanted to know what would happen. 

"At Folklistan we have chosen to have an open list," the party claims on its website. "This means that any of you who sympathise with us can also stand as a candidate for us. It's not going to be anonymous power brokers in a party who decide who represents us in the European Parliament. It's the people. Do you want better politicians? Then be one." 

When I followed the link provided on the site to the Swedish Election Authority, I only had to put in my BankID to register, which proved too much of a temptation to resist.  

At the time, the party had not clearly stated what any of its policies were. They had merely set up a website, which was, perhaps intentionally, full of grammatical errors, weird constructions and vague truisms. 

They've now said they want to entirely abolish the right to asylum in Sweden, which is a proposal that puts them further to the right of the already far-right Sweden Democrats. 

Sara Skyttedal and Jan Emanuel, the two renegade politicians fronting the party, have also said they want Sweden to negotiate with the EU in a tougher way, to "get a better deal for Sweden".

There was a lot I wanted to find out when I registered: would someone from the party get in touch with me and would this give me some clues as to who else was behind it? Would I be required to do anything? Would I need to sign anything about how I should behave, or what I can say? 

So far it seems like the answer to all of these questions is "no".

But at the same time, being a candidate appears to give me no rights whatsoever over the party programme or about how a party MEP would vote in the European Parliament in the still fairly unlikely scenario that they manage to get one.

So while I'm free to call for whatever policy I like – there's no party whip – any vote for me as a candidate (should I not cancel my registration, which I will) would not go towards me starting a new life in Brussels.

Instead, it would go towards Skyttedal or Emanuel getting to vote in Brussels and Strasbourg.

When I checked with the Swedish Election Authority, they said I had not done anything illegal.

"I don’t think that you’ve done anything formally wrong," a press officer told me. "Although if you write an article about this I think you need to state that you do not want to be a candidate for the party."

She did, however, query whether Folklistan had an open list as a result of a new bottom-up approach to politics, or simply because they had missed the deadline.

To have a closed list, you need so-called partibeteckningen, or party designation, which means that the party can choose which candidates represent it, stop other parties using the same name in the election, and gain the right to receive a list of names and addresses of everyone qualified to vote. 

"To do that you need to register before the February 29th, so as the party was registered after that, its not possible to have a locked list," the press spokesperson said. 

To explain the absence of a party congress, or any way for members or party candidates to set policy, a spokesperson for the new party said it was "not a party, more like a political alliance". 

But if it's a political alliance that hopes, as it claims to do, to draw candidates from across the political spectrum, it seems weird that the founders can propose a radical policy like abolishing the right to asylum without any kind of process or dialogue.

This seems less like a political alliance, and more like a dictatorship.