Well, definitely NOT in Fareed Zakaria’s “Rise of illiberal democracy.”
The first time that populism was conceptualized and defined simply as “democratic illiberalism” was in this paper, published online in FirstView in July 2013. Interestingly, the subject matter of the paper was a longitudinal comparative analysis of the two countries which, back in the early 2010s, already seemed like exemplars of populism, Greece of its leftist variant, Hungary of a rightist one. [For the record, one of the reviewers rejected the article because (a) the definition was “unconventional” and (b) the comparison of the two countries seemed rather outlandish.]
At the time, I presented the ideas in the paper in a few places and occasions. In one such place, there was an academic and (as I would learn later) close friend of Viktor Orbán who approached me after the presentation for the usual after-event little talk. He was a pleasant old fellow and, as I distinctly remember, he was impressed by my definition of populism. The paper was published in print in early 2014. In the summer of the same year, Orbán would make ripples world-wide with his famous speech about turning Hungary into an “illiberal democratic” state.
