Mullvad founder is the main financier of Sweden's Örebro Party

A post on the Mastodon instance det.social has drawn renewed attention to the political donations of one of Europe's best-known privacy companies. Written by user Jörg Seidel, the post cites reporting by the Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman showing that Daniel Berntsson, founder and co-owner of the VPN provider Mullvad, gave five million Swedish kronor to the populist Örebro Party.

The message spread quickly: within days it had gathered more than a thousand boosts and roughly 800 favourites, and the discussion moved well beyond the original thread.

72 percent of the party's income

According to Flamman, the money covered 72 percent of the Örebro Party's income in 2025, making it both the party's dominant source of funding and the largest single private donation to a Swedish party that year. The party's leader, Markus Allard, has been a commissioner on the Örebro municipal council since 2018 and has sat in the regional council since 2022.

Berntsson told the newspaper that the gift was personal. “This is a donation from me personally,” he wrote, adding that his ideal is free movement, but that poor crime, immigration and integration policy had produced what he called today's miserable situation. He said he hoped the party would do nationally what it has done in Örebro.

A company built on anonymity

Mullvad VPN AB responded on social media that the donation is “a private matter and is not part of Mullvad's mission”. The company added that Berntsson and co-owner Fredrik Strömberg disagree on many issues, but share fundamental values on freedom of expression. Mullvad, which sells subscriptions that promise anonymous browsing, reported revenue of 314 million kronor in 2024.

Why it matters

The Örebro Party advocates what it calls large-scale re-migration from Sweden. Morgan Finnsiö, a researcher at the Expo foundation, describes it as fundamentally populist, saying it has moved clearly to the right and recently embraced explicit ethnonationalism. Allard himself left the Left Youth League in 2014.

The reporting also suggests the donation was the trigger for the party's decision to run in the national parliamentary election. For users of privacy tools, the episode raises a question that has little to do with cryptography: where the money paid for a subscription ends up.