The astonishingly preponderant mobilization of the “popular” in politics in a society that has experienced frequent polarization (Erdoğan and Uyan-Semerci 2018b), has provided the opportunity for insightful work on issues of mobilization, leadership and discourse. However, the centrality of the notion of the people in politics sometimes leads to misreading the ways “the people” is deployed as a political category and gives rise to flaws in the analysis of political discourse, action and mobilization. Indicatively, some (see for example Tekdemir 2018 or Erdoğan et al. 2018) imply that the leaders of the secular, Islamist and leftist presidential coalitions/parties in the 2018 presidential election embraced populist politics/discourse. On the other hand, Aytaç and Elçi (2019) imply that they can discern populist parties in Turkey dating back to the 1960s largely due to the charismatic character of their leaders, while Tekdemir, goes even further and argues that the Gezi urban protests could also be characterised as populist. This paper deploys a synthetic conceptualization of populism that retains the critical edge of the concept and allows us to use it in the study of Turkish politics without collapsing all appeals to the people into populist politics. Tracing the emergence of the idea of “the people” and its uses in Turkish politics from its independence to the present, and drawing on a conceptualization of populism as a political logic that promotes the construction of a polarised political field and posits the people as the indivisible and sole bearer of rights, at the expense of particularistic or individual rights, this paper identifies and discusses critically significant discursive traditions from above and below that have privileged abstract collective political subjects such as “the nation” and “the people”. It notes the simultaneous appeal to, and mistrust of “the people” by the republican elites and examines the impasses of a system that was geared towards creating a compliant people and the appropriation and transformation of the exclusive divides erected by the Kemalist state into resources for populist forms of mobilization and politics by counter-elites, including the conservative-Islamist elites of the past two decades. Zooming into this time the paper provides an outline of the discursive, performative and representation aspects of the populism of the AKP and suggests that the democratic promise of the latter’s populist politics (and populism in general for that matter) “effectively” displaces popular sovereignty or divorces it from its material dimension of empowerment.