The Örebro Party entered the municipal council in 2018 and the regional council in 2022. In this year's elections, the party has set its sights on the Riksdag through the so-called 12 percent threshold.
In order to be included in the mandate distribution, the party needs to receive at least 12 percent of the votes in one of the 29 constituencies, in this case Örebro County.
So far, however, no party has managed to overcome that barrier.
You can see it as a kind of second chance, to ensure that the regional representation is okay, says Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson, professor of political science at the University of Gothenburg.
It has never happened so far, although it has come close a few times.
Excluded from V
Markus Allard was chairman of the Young Left in Örebro County when he was expelled from the Left Party in 2013 for liking the left-wing extremist group Revolutionary Front on Facebook. Instead, he started the Örebro Party, whose politics today are “difficult to place on the right-left scale,” the party writes on its website.
One of the core issues is an extremely strict migration policy. The party also wants to lower politicians' salaries and hold more referendums, among other things.
At the same time, it is mainly through Markus Allard's hateful outbursts in the municipal and regional councils that the party has gained popularity.
Last winter, a meeting of the regional council had to be completely interrupted when a debate about the budget degenerated.
"I think you're a fucking coward. You're a fucking idiot. You're an idiot through and through," Allard exclaimed to moderate opposition councillor Sebastian Cehlin.
“Permanent election campaign”
The meeting was featured a few days later in SVT's political satire program "Svenska nyheter" and received even greater coverage.
It's like a constant election campaign for him. But no one wants to cooperate with him, so he doesn't get anything done in terms of decisions, says Jan Olsson, professor of political science at Örebro University.
People seem to think it's fun to vote for him anyway. But I think the media has a double standard there. They seem to be more interested in their own cliques than in deepening the image of the party.
According to an opinion poll published by Nerikes Allehanda, the Örebro Party may be on the verge of tripling its support in the region to around 15 percent.
At the parliamentary level, however, it appears to be considerably further away. In a survey from Infostat that Omni reported on this week, the response option "other party" in Örebro County received only 6.3 percent.
It has become increasingly common for voters to vote for different parties locally and at the national level, notes Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson.
What is important for Allard is how things go outside Örebro itself, in the other slightly larger towns in the county. But they need about 24,000 votes, which is quite a lot, he says.
No party that has not also passed the 4 percent threshold for the Riksdag has so far managed to get over 12 percent of the Riksdag votes in a constituency.
The closest so far was Alf Svensson and his KDS, now the Christian Democrats, in 1988. The party received 2.9 percent in the parliamentary election - and 10.6 percent in the Jönköping County constituency.
In 2002, the Norrbotten Party, with Lars Törnman as party leader, made an attempt to reach the Riksdag, but stopped at 9.1 percent of the votes in Norrbotten County.
Feminist Initiative received 3.1 percent of the votes in the 2014 parliamentary election - but reached 7.18 percent in the Stockholm Municipality constituency.
In the 2006 election, the Sweden Democrats reached 7.13 percent in the Skåne County West constituency, compared to 2.93 percent nationwide.
Source: The Election Authority and others.
