Description
This paper explores the connection populism as a stylistic performance and leadership branding in the international. The paper brings together the literature on branding, and foreign policy roles to trace how individuals use the international as a theatrical stage of recurrent stylistic performances. Populist leaders develop and promote a type of leadership brand in the international by locating different type of individual roles that underpin their brands and solidify the emotional bond and nexus leader and people against an undesirable elite. The main claim of this paper is that the type of populist leadership brand or political personas these leaders build and enact is a performative act that impact foreign policy relations as their framing of foreign policy is a performance of a recurrent crisis and of urgency that needs prompt leadership solutions that are usually out of the norm. While the leader performance unfolds in front of a domestic and international audience, it is this former dimension where crisis and urgency representations of the international are amplified by the leader as these actors need to keep the existing emotional bond of the populist leadership brand with followers and prevent audience costs coming from the people of the populist project.
