Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden’s national elections for the first time.
Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled “Immigration,” “Political individualism,” and “Moral individualism.” Before that, he had not posted since 2019.
The flurry of posts follows weeks of customer criticism over the donation – for example, Finnish blog Moonwriting’s post “I’m done with Mullvad.” Another blog, Unutterable, is more direct: “Mullvad funding the far-right and the problem with tech company ownership.” The Hacker News discussion thread about the donations has reached a remarkable 1,784 comments so far.
Mullvad was co-founded and is still jointly owned and run by two CEOs, Berntsson and Fredrik Strömberg. Its name, as reflected in the company’s logo, is Swedish for “mole.” It also offers the Mullvad Browser, a privacy-enhanced fork of Firefox ESR co-developed with the Tor Project. Swedish socialist newspaper Flamman (“The Flame”) revealed the donation in its story “High-profile techie gives millions to the Örebro Party.”
In a post on X, the company said it was devoted to freedom of speech and tolerance, saying: “It should be obvious that Daniel’s private donation to a political party is not part of Mullvad’s values or mission, in the same way that someone’s opinions on animal rights, taxes or public healthcare policy isn’t.”
Turkey is actually a great example for my point, not yours. Erdogan has used nominally democratic supermajority mechanisms to strip Kurdish politicians of immunity, remove elected Kurdish mayors, imprison journalists covering Kurdish issues, and consolidate executive power to the point where the democratic form is a shell. If that’s your model of ethnic cleansing without dictatorship, it’s nothing but democracy in name.
The supermajority argument also has a structural flaw. It assumes the minority being cleansed retains voting power throughout the process. But the entire mechanism of the policy is to remove them before they can vote against it. Strip citizenship, remove from voter rolls, criminalize political organizing. A supermajority that votes to disenfranchise a minority and then prevents them voting on the disenfranchisement isn’t a functioning democracy but is already on the fall to authoritarianism.
And you don’t even need a majority to capture the apparatus. The Nazis never won a majority. Neither did Trump in 2016 or 2024 measured against eligible voters. Around 30% of actual eligible voters in both cases was sufficient to claim power through a combination of voter suppression, institutional manipulation, minority rule mechanisms like the electoral college, and strategic exploitation of democratic procedural norms that weren’t designed to survive bad faith actors. The democratic form provided legitimacy cover while it was dismantled from within.
Ethnic cleansing doesn’t require a dictatorship as a precondition. Nor do the destruction of institutions, nor does the use of religious idolatry to provide a pretense of legitimacy for war, death, and destruction. They produce one as an outcome. Fascism is an ideological process, not a label applied once a checklist is met.
I can see where you’re coming from, as I mentioned, Turkey isn’t the best example of a democracy, but even now Erdogan can still get removed by a majority of the population, which is not the case in a dictatorship. A dictator can only be removed by the military.
I disagree with the last sentence, the definition of fascism is pretty clear, it is an ideology with certain beliefs and opinions. Not a process, not a form of government, but a set of ideas. If the set of ideas is not complete, it is not that ideology. I already gave you the name of the ideology you were describing.
It is like describing something socialist as stalinist. Like yeah, stalinists are socialists but not every socialist is a stalinist.