Rise of populist politics in the 21s century calls scholars and politicians alike to reflect upon the question of how politics and democracy have been understood. Drawing on the theory of hegemony, this article establishes a distinction between democracy and ‘demography’ as a key line of conceptualization in politics. It highlights a central misunderstanding at the core of the demonization of populism: For radical democratic theory, ‘the people’ is not a demographic, socio-economic, or historically sedimented category tied to some characteristics, but a performative process of ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ ‘the people’ as a self-consciously enacted polity. This statement challenges the taken-for-granted status of subjectivities of political struggle and links this approach to other contemporary discussions of politics, democracy, and populism. After discussing how anti, neo and post-foundational theoretical accounts on populism reveal a dimension of politics and representation, this article emphasizes action and performativity over static categories and models characteristic of political realism and political system approaches.

二十一世纪民粹主义政治的兴起要求学者和政治家都思考如何理解政治和民主的问题。本文基于霸权主义理论，确立了民主与“人口统计学”之间的区别，作为政治概念化的关键路线。它凸显了民粹主义妖魔化核心的一个主要误解：对于激进的民主理论，“人民”不是与某些特征联系在一起的人口，社会经济或历史沉淀类别，而是“存在”和“存在”的执行过程。 “成为”“人民”是一种自觉制定的政体。该声明挑战了政治斗争的主体性的理所当然的地位，并将这种方法与当代其他有关政治，民主和民粹主义的讨论联系起来。