Örebro doesn't feel like an extreme place. Sweden's seventh largest city, it has a thriving university, a magnificent medieval castle and successful manufacturers. It has its problem areas, like many other places in Sweden, and last year was the scene of a deadly school shooting, but overall it remains pleasant and prosperous, like a Sweden in miniature.
Örebro is a microcosm of Sweden in other ways too: its citizens earn roughly the median Swedish salary. They also vote pretty much like the average Swede, and as a result the city is seen as a bit of a political bellwether.
So driving into the city last weekend it was a shock to be confronted by election posters from a local party polling in double figures locally:
"Ut med packet." Rough translation: "Out with the scum."
If there was any doubt which groups the poster, from Örebropartiet (the Örebro Party), was targeting, a visit to the party's website made it clear: immigrants and their Swedish-born children. In both its policies and its rhetoric the party has staked out a position far more extreme than the Sweden Democrats, currently the party furthest to the right in the Riksdag.
The party's demagogic leader, Markus Allard, has attracted rare national attention to the proceedings of Örebro's municipal council. He's an unlikely far-right rabble-rouser: he started out on the left of politics as an activist for the Left Party and his grandfather was a Social Democrat speaker of the Riksdag.
The party has received a donation worth half a million kronor from Daniel Berntsson, co-founder of Mullvad VPN. Allard says he takes frequent advice from right-wing activist Chang Frick.
Allard's invective has made national headlines – in a now notorious speech in the council chamber he called a fellow councillor "f-ing coward, f-ing fool, an out-and-out idiot". When told to moderate his tone, he replied "I'll use whatever f-ing tone I like".
Despite its name and Allard's roots in local politics, the Örebro Party has ambitions way beyond local issues; its overwhelming priority is making Sweden a "monocultural" country.
It wants to make it possible to strip citizenship, not only from immigrants but also from their children. It also wants new national censuses and the registration of fingerprints, iris scans and DNA, explicitly to identify people for expulsion.
It proposes incentives to raise birth rates among what it calls the "productive Swedish population".
There's more: the party wants to sack all judges in Sweden's Supreme Court. "The fish rots from the head," its manifesto asserts.
Now some polls hint Allard might become the first politician ever to get into parliament via a local mandate.
While parties usually need 4 percent of the vote nationally to get seats in the Riksdag, they can also enter by scoring 12 percent in a single constituency; a new poll by Novus for Örebro's local paper Nerikes Allehanda showed 15 percent of people in Örebro County plan to vote for Allard's party in the election to the regional council, held the same day as the general election.
It's certainly not nailed on for Allard – voters often vote for different parties in regional and national elections – but his entry into the Riksdag would be a sensation, not least as his platform would be easily the most extreme of any political party to reach the Riksdag in modern times. The worry for Sweden's mainstream politicians is that Örebro will be a bellwether this time too.
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