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Anyone who stays updated with Western political developments can easily notice that actors who are labelled as ‘populists’ are often somewhat nationalist too. Does it then follow that populism and nationalism are equivalent? After all, scholarly work on European politics has often conflated the two concepts, treating populism as a far-right nationalist phenomenon, or as a ‘kind of nationalism’(Stewart 1969: 183). Yet, in recent years, a growing body of literature challenges this assumption, by conceptualizing populism and nationalism as analytically distinct phenomena, much as they can overlap and/or interconnect in concrete politics (De Cleen and Stavrakakis 2017).

We begin this chapter by engaging with this academic debate, looking at the notion of nationalism and its implications for studies of populism. We argue that the ambiguities and nuances of the populism/nationalism nexus cannot be fully illuminated by …