Topic summary
Populist
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Populism.
Populist hype and scholarly debate
Although scholars had already observed that populism was becoming a recurring feature of Western democracies by the early 1990s, the term gained unprecedented global prominence following the political upheavals of 2016—most notably, the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States and the United Kingdom's vote to leave the European Union. Both events were widely interpreted as expressions of populist sentiment, sparking renewed public interest in the concept. Reflecting this heightened attention, the Cambridge Dictionary selected "populism" as its Word of the Year in 2017.