Populism as a topic remains locked in a terminological anarchy occupying a contentious position within contemporary political discourse. Such contention becomes further compounded when assessing populism as it appears online, offering both myriad challenges and possibilities for understandings of the novel emergence of the specifically Digital Populist.
Through a six-month digital ethnography commencing on the then-Twitter, completing on the now-X, and a series of semi-structured interviews investigating the cases of Britain, France, and Germany, this paper explores the Digital Populist as an inherently queered conception, rejecting the entrenched normative binaries engaged routinely within traditional academic approaches to populism. The reliance upon enforced binaries has rendered explorations ill-equipped to comprehend the myriad permutations, intentions, and presentations of populism online. Through discussing Digital Populism directly with politicians, this exploration describes a concept far beyond ideology and ideologues, instead reframing it as an audience-informed performance online guided by pragmatic reactions to the context.
Digital Populism was perceived to be a reactive and embodied performance, complete with carefully scripted, rehearsed, and embodied presentations, performed to an assembled social media audience, complete with its polemics, polarisations, and controversies. Populisms follow a queer path, featuring multiple phases of conflict and reconciliation of the self upon a spectrum of thought. With surprising alignment, national and political divisions seemed to play little part in their performance, as instead pressures of the system came to the fore, altering and guiding the politicians into embracing populist discourses. Slowly, through a breakdown of binaries, the politicians became the public, and the public became them.