ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to briefly map out what scholars say populism is. It focuses on how populists use the media. Sociologists and historians first used the concept of populism to describe a particular phase or stage in the modernisation process linked to the transition from an agrarian to an industrial and urban society. Populism can also be conceptualised as a political strategy to get power and to govern. Populism is ‘a basic concept deployed in the public languages in which political controversy was conducted’. The exclusionary dynamic of left-wing populism is not only used against class enemies but also and fundamentally against political enemies. Populist regimes combine a democratic commitment to elections as the only legitimate tool to elect and remove politicians with undemocratic views of political rivals as enemies and conceptions of the people as unitary actors and, in some cases, of the political theologies of the leader as the savior of the people.
