Populism has been extensively examined as an ideology, a discourse, and a political strategy. Nevertheless, comparatively little is known about how people interpret populist messages and what they ultimately take away from them. This paper addresses this gap by investigating how voters in six European countries—Germany, Hungary, Italy, Spain, Romania, and the United Kingdom—make sense of populist discourse and which elements they regard as most salient. It further seeks to account for cross-national differences in these interpretations by considering systemic, institutional, and individual-level factors. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with supporters and non-supporters of populist parties, the analysis shows how personal orientations, political trajectories, and varying degrees of democratic consolidation shape what citizens extract from populist rhetoric. In doing so, the paper contributes theoretically by sharpening the conceptual distinction between populist attitudes and attitudes toward populism, thereby clarifying the symbolic and normative dimensions at stake in contemporary debates on populist politics in Europe. Empirically, it illustrates how citizens attribute meaning to specific components of populist rhetoric and why particular cues become more prominent than others across national contexts.
