Although populism does not dictate a coherent ideological or programmatic agenda, some of its elements still leave distinct marks on the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This paper argues for the study of populism in its tangible policy impacts and scrutinizes the nexus of populism and foreign policy in contemporary Turkey under President Erdoğan's rule. Despite the abundant references to the 'people' in the populist rhetoric, it identifies personalization in foreign policy decision-making, nationalization in foreign policy implementation, and civilizationalization in the foreign policy discourse. Having established the patterns of populist foreign policy from a wider reading, this study then examines, generally, how populism has informed Turkish foreign policy and, specifically, Turkey's approach to the recent border disputes over the gas fields in the Eastern Mediterranean.KEYWORDS Populism; populist foreign policy; the Eastern Mediterranean; Turkey; personalization Based on the steady dismantling of democratic norms and rising support for authoritarian alternatives, some scholars alarmingly associate this gloomy picture of democratic de-consolidation with the meteoric rise of populist movements (Norris & Inglehart, 2018;Pappas, 2019). Similarly, the 2017 Munich Security Report identified the populist trend as a prime danger to both the international security order and the liberal-democratic status quo (Munich Security Conference, 2017). Contrary to this understanding of populism as the ultimate driver behind the current wave of de-democratization, others consider populism much less central to contemporary politics. They either consider the populist threat to be overstated, or they challenge the analytical value of the term and suggest avoiding its use at all (Akkerman, 2017;Herkman, 2017;Mickey, 2017). In between the problem-solving approach of the first line of thinking, and the negating attitude of the second, this paper calls for a more nuanced consideration of populism.