Aiolfi’s book analyses populism through the lens of performance studies, specifically what he terms the ‘stylistic approach’. According to the author, significant limitations persist in the current study of populism. The various approaches to the concept fail to address major conceptual and methodological conundrums arising from the research. Aiolfi brings to centre stage the performative aspects of the populist actor, which link content and form. In his view, performance and style determine the exact degree and nature of a player’s populist tendencies. The perspective is applied to an examination of two well-recognised populist figures: Donald Trump during his 2016 US presidential campaign and Marine Le Pen during her 2017 French presidential campaign.

The opening chapter introduces the research questions, the case selection (including brief biographies of the two leaders), and the overall structure of the book. From here, the author lays out the framework of the theory of populist style and performance. Chapter 2 conveys the main approaches of the study of populism and outlines their respective strengths and weaknesses. Aiolfi presents populism as an elusive and contested concept, often conflated with nationalism and far-right politics. He then places his standpoint under the roof of the sociocultural–discursive–performative approach and argues that the specifics of populism lie in the interaction between form and content, with targeted emphasis on how certain beliefs are articulated.

The next chapter sets out the various aspects of the populist performance or style that are mentioned intermittently throughout the text. Aiolfi meticulously defines the concepts of style, performance, and performativity and how they combine to produce a functioning mechanism for assessing how populism works. He identifies three core clusters that characterise the populist political style: the performances of identity, transgression, and crisis. The performance of identity involves the positive representation of the collective construct of the ‘people’ and its negative mirror image, the ‘elite’. The performance of transgression refers to actions undertaken to break established political norms for a particular purpose. This definition relates to the sociocultural dimension of populism, usually labelled as ‘bad manners’ or ‘low politics’. The use of such terms reflects normative judgements and is something Aiolfi wishes to avoid. Finally, the performance of crisis concerns the framing and articulation of a crisis facing society, whose fault lies with the excluded ‘others’ and the complacent or nefarious ‘elite’. These performances emanate from the embodiment of the populist actor, who walks a tightrope between ordinariness and extraordinariness.

The fourth chapter details the methodology, research methods (critical thematic analysis and performance analysis), and corpus (political rallies, presidential debates, and political advertisements) used for the study. Critical thematic analysis is implemented through coding of the corpus text. Performance analysis is guided by a series of questions designed to explore the varying nontextual elements of political performance: symbols and scripts (the context), the populist actor (the performer), the audience (the receiver), and the mise-en-scène (set conditions).

Building on this is a scrutiny of the populist performance of the actors chosen as case studies. The fifth chapter focuses on the performance of identity by Trump and Le Pen. It inspects the concepts of the ‘people’: the superlatives, social class, nationality, and the ‘others’, along with global and local ‘elite’. It then charts the individual identity performance of the leaders in relation to their communality with and their particularity from the ‘people’. The sixth chapter centres on the performance of transgression of established interactional, rhetorical, and theatrical norms such as personal attacks, innuendos and insinuations, interruptions, threatening body language, informality, emotions, the use of humour and solemnity, and political traditions and customs.

Chapter 7, which concentrates on performance of crisis, portrays the narratives employed to describe the emergency ‘people’ face. The exploration starts with visual representations of the crisis. Following are the different forms of crises caused either by ‘others’ (migration, economic, security, and identity) and those created by the ‘elite’ (crisis of leadership, accountability, and vulnerability).

The final chapter summarises the main similarities and differences in the style of Trump and Le Pen, which pertain to ideological, personal, contextual, and rhetorical factors.

Overall, the book offers an original and valuable addition to the study of populism, focusing more on the form and medium of the subject than on text and content. It highlights the way populist beliefs are articulated and not simply what they mean. Here lies the potential fragility of the book, which nonetheless still mostly relies on content analysis. The time frame chosen for the book’s examination is limited, possibly making the findings less substantive. Furthermore, focusing exclusively on leaders from the populist right could also limit the research’s outcomes.