A populist is a politician who, in plain language, promises various barely realizable foolish things or appeals to simplistic notions in order to gain power on a wave of voter emotions. This is the populist method. This, actually, could be where one would finish, if not for one significant remark: not everyone can be a populist. This is still a skill one needs to have. To use the populist method, one must, first of all, deeply and sincerely despise the “population” being turned into dupes (or sincerely believe in one’s own drivel, which does happen, though more rarely), and be a real actor.
In this sense, the current president, despite also making many unfulfillable promises during the elections, is not a full-fledged populist, since he possesses no acting talents and the drive of a villain-manipulator, and certainly not the charisma of a saint. Viktor Fyodorovych became president not thanks to his own populist promises, but exclusively thanks to a real populist—Tymoshenko. Any other candidate (except perhaps Symonenko) would have won against him in the second round. The thing is that populism, by appealing to the simplest notions, inevitably creates its own mythology, which can greatly irritate people adhering to a different populist mythology. A classic example—this is communists and fascists, who differed from each other in the details of their mythology, but precisely these details mattered to their followers. Tymoshenko’s mythology irritated more people than it attracted, and that’s the whole story.
However, the presence or absence of a populist leader in power in no way changes the fact that state policy itself is populist. This is an inevitable property of a system in which the exercise of political power is conceived as obtaining certain “points” by specific politicians. And since in real life we deal precisely with the consequences of state policies, the presence or absence in power of people who can be called populists changes little. One can say that an avowed populist can exacerbate the consequences of state populism. One can also say that a conscious anti-populist can soften these consequences; in all other cases, state activity by itself produces populist decisions.