The Helsinki Notebooks

It has become almost redundant to talk about the fluid nature of the populism concept and the buzzword-like label it has gained over the past two decades. Indeed, when discussing populism in the academic, media, political or public discourse spaces, the perception and signification of populism changes almost rapidly. However, most importantly, the term is frequently conflated with other notions that predominantly have a negative connotation (Stavrakakis 2024; Karavasilis 2022): racism, nationalism, authoritarianism, demagoguery, corruption, clientelism, misinformation, and many more.¹ Among these conflations, some accounts connect populism to fascism, often basing their analysis on pre-existing misunderstandings that surround the analysis of contemporary populist far-right actors or transferring their analysis to historical examples such as fascism in Europe during the 1930s. However, a closer look at the two concepts not only unveils how populism has been used as a euphemism for fascism but also how the cautious examination of them as two separate phenomena can also help us understand populism’s analytical utility for antifascism and antifascist action.

Despite having profound progressive origins in the 19^th century,² the history of populism has become  connected to conceptual conflations that almost exclusively have a pejorative connotation. Since the post-war period, academics in the United States, and subsequently in Europe, have theorised populism as a phenomenon connected with demagogy, nativism, anti-Semitism and economic, social and political backwardness.³ More recently, the emergence of far-right actors has prompted scholars to focus on their populist aspects to understand their appeal. In a period where the prevalence of populism as a conceptual and analytical term has become rather common, populism has come to signify a threat to liberal democracies in Europe and the Americas.⁴ The appearance of populism as an all-encompassing buzzword utilised to describe almost any political alternative to the neoliberal hegemonic order has allowed the far right to appropriate the term for their own benefit and to use it as a euphemism.⁵ Simply put, for the far-right, it is better to be called a ‘populist’ than an ‘extremist’, ‘nationalist’ or ‘fascist’. Of course, this understanding of far-right actors as populist has also been promoted by academics, the media and politicians, contributing to the mainstreaming of the far-right agenda and ideas.⁶

The conflation of populism and fascism, though, is not new. The development of populism studies by Latin American scholars like Gino Germani led to an intrinsic perception between populism and fascism, mostly based on the example of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and his characterisation as a reactionary actor to technological and economic modernisation.⁷ Most recently, this conflation has also been evident in understanding both concepts within the contemporary framework of understanding far-right actor emergence in parallel with historical cases.⁸ Populism is often equated with fascism as anti-pluralist and an illiberal phenomenon, without providing sufficient evidence of what makes populism unique and distinguishable from these concepts. In certain cases, populism is understood as fascism adapted to the democratic context, only to revert to fascism in times when liberal democracy is heavily contested.⁹ The use of similar elements between populism and fascism (i.e. the emphasis on ‘the people’ and the antagonism with ‘the elite’) and the opposition to the liberal-democratic context has been the focal point of this conflation.¹⁰ In turn, leading to its continuation in exploring far-right actors. Only recently have there been attempts to disentangle the terms and provide clarity on the stark differences between the two. For example, Udeepta Chakravarty and Federico Tarragoni have offered a post-Marxist and historical approach, respectively, to separate populism from its alleged organic relationship with fascism.¹¹

Separating these concepts has the added benefits of addressing fascism directly, understanding and acknowledging its contemporary traits and developing a left populism as a strategy to combat fascist actors. The progressive roots of populism are important for this distinction.¹² If we take into consideration the connection between fascism and capitalism, or more specifically, big enterprise – regardless of the contemporary transformations of fascism.¹³ Then the popular core of populism is key for seeing that the concentrated antagonism between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’, ‘the power bloc’ or ‘the establishment’ is vastly different from fascism’s inherent nativist, racist and authoritarian elements. More importantly, the use of populism by fascists only allows them to falsely claim that they are the representatives of the people, leading to an appropriation of popular sovereignty by fascist and far-right actors. As the most recent example of Elon Musk and Donald Trump has shown, there is an unholy alliance between big tech and reactionary forces (including fascist forces) that claim to promote the people’s interests.¹⁴ In doing so, shifting the blame from the power bloc defined by neoliberal capitalism to immigration, multiculturalism, ‘the woke agenda’ and many more.

In this context, populism as a political strategy can help against fascism and reinvigorate the antifascist legacy of Europe, and beyond, to the best possible extent. The left-wing progressive potential of populism can be employed by antifascism to create broader social and political alliances focusing on the importance of popular sovereignty against fascism and in creating an antagonism between antifascist and fascist camps.¹⁵ Following the current developments of fascism and its deterministic pessimism, fuelled by a reactionary accelerationist logic.¹⁶ Antifascism, with the help of populism, should promote an optimistic vision of the future that incorporates environmentalist concerns and is defined by a post-capitalist horizon. However, this will only be possible if the distinction between populism and fascism becomes clearer in academic and everyday political practice.

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1. Yannis Stavrakakis, Populist Discourse: Recasting Populism Research (Abingdon: Routledge, 2024); Lazaros Karavasilis, ‘Populism and Other -Isms. Comparing Left- and Right-Wing Populism in Greece and Germany’ (thesis, Loughborough University, 2022), https://doi.org/10.26174/thesis.lboro.19794052.v1. ↩︎
2. Thomas Frank, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2020); Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017). ↩︎
3. Yannis Stavrakakis, ‘How Did ‘Populism’Become a Pejorative Concept? And Why Is This Important Today? A Genealogy of Double Hermeneutics’, Thessaloniki: POPULISMUS Working Papers 6 (2017): 5. ↩︎
4. Stefan Rummens, ‘Populism as a Threat to Liberal Democracy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 554–70, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198803560.013.27; William A. Galston, Anti-Pluralism: The Populist Threat to Liberal Democracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt21668rd. ↩︎
5. Sophia Hunger and Fred Paxton, ‘What’s in a Buzzword? A Systematic Review of the State of Populism Research in Political Science’, Political Science Research and Methods 10, no. 3 (2022): 617–33. ↩︎
6. Katy Brown, Aurelien Mondon, and Aaron Winter, ‘The Far Right, the Mainstream and Mainstreaming: Towards a Heuristic Framework’, Journal of Political Ideologies 28, no. 2 (4 May 2023): 162–79, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1949829; Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream (Verso Books, 2020). ↩︎
7. Stavrakakis, Populist Discourse, 68–69. ↩︎
8. Roger Eatwell, ‘Populism and Fascism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Populism, ed. Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 363–83; Federico Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019); Sofia Vasilopoulou and Daphne Halikiopoulou, The Golden Dawn’s ‘Nationalist Solution’: Explaining the Rise of the Far Right in Greece (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). ↩︎
9. Finchelstein, From Fascism to Populism in History. ↩︎
10. Eatwell, ‘Populism and Fascism’. ↩︎
11. ‘Populist Logic, Populism, and Fascism: A Contribution to Conceptual Discrimination via Post-Marxism’, Thesis Eleven, 22 April 2025, 07255136251335670, https://doi.org/10.1177/07255136251335670; ‘Populism, an Ideology without History? A New Genetic Approach’, Journal of Political Ideologies 29, no. 1 (2 January 2024): 42–63, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2021.1979130. ↩︎
12. Stavrakakis, Populist Discourse; Frank, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism. ↩︎
13. Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso Books, 2019); Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, ‘The Rise of End Times Fascism’, The Guardian, 13 April 2025, sec. US news, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk. ↩︎
14. Johan Farkas and Aurelien Mondon, ‘The Roots of Reactionary Tech Oligarchy and the Need for Radical Democratic Alternatives’, Communication, Culture and Critique, 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/ccc/tcaf011. ↩︎
15. Marina Prentoulis, Left Populism in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2021), https://www.plutobooks.com/9781786806949/left-populism-in-europe; Óscar García Agustín, Left-Wing Populism: The Politics of the People (Bingley: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020). ↩︎
16. Klein and Taylor, ‘The Rise of End Times Fascism’. ↩︎

To cite this article:

Lazaros Karavasilis, ‘Populism Is Not Fascism: Here Is How Antifascist Movements Can Benefit From That Distinction,’ The Helsinki Notebooks, Vol. 1, No. 17 (15 July 2025).

Populism Is Not Fascism: Here Is How Antifascist Movements Can Benefit From That Distinction © 2025 by Lazaros Karavasilis is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0