The Populist Style: Trump, Le Pen and Performances of the Far Right. Théo Aiolfi (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025), 257 pp. ISBN: 9781399537438.

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 farright politics.He then places his standpoint under the roof of the sociocultural-discursiveperformative 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