The observance of democratic principles is clearly not enough to stop populism. The paper is aimed at answering the question: why is this so? To understand this phenomenon one should see it as an instrument of manipulation applied to political discourse by extremist politicians, which becomes their style of making politics. Although democratic procedures can be used by such politicians to obtain high positions in the political realm, their further activities usually violate at least some of those procedures. The further arguments of the paper show that, behind its democratic surface, populism as a style of making politics is simply a corrupted form of democracy and the media play a very ambivalent role in this process.
