Description
One way to understand and study populism is to define it as a political style that underscores its performative dimension (Moffitt, 2016). The performance of populist leaders involves not only their discourse but also their delivery, aesthetics, and symbolic acts coming together to address an audience (Moffitt, 2016). Populist rhetoric and leadership styles have received extensive scholarly attention, and these studies predominantly agree that populist rhetoric conveys the notion of a struggle between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’ (Mudde, 2004). Benjamin Moffit argues that ‘the people’ cannot be restricted to a group with definite characteristics, boundaries, structure or permanence (Moffit, 2019 p.99). Much of the literature treats ‘the people’ as the sole audience of the populist performance. More often than not this audience is kept equivalent as to domestic constituents. Therefore, the question of who the audience remains underexplored, especially in foreign policy. This paper argues for a conceptual distinction between ‘the people’ as a discursive construct and ‘the audience’ as a more fragmented, heterogeneous formation. Populist performances do not address a singular, monolithic public but rather unfold across layered communicative arenas speaking simultaneously to different audiences that include domestic constituencies, ideological supporters, international institutions, and symbolic ‘others’. These audiences may respond in different ways: through resonance, rejection, or silence. To illustrate this conceptual distinction, the paper will examine Erdoğan as an illustrative case with various symbolic foreign policy performances, ranging from the reconversion of Hagia Sophia to speeches delivered on international platforms, each strategically staged for both mulilayered and multilevel audiences.
