The paper discusses the two classical spatiotemporal regimes of democracy: the bodily co-presence of the republican polity in direct forms of democracy on the one hand, and the representative mode of liberal democracy on the other. Using insights from Mouffe’s, Rancière’s and Lorey’s political theories, the paper reflects on the pitfalls of direct participation as well as of representative modes such as parliamentary elections. It combines this discussion with an analysis of recent phenomena of populism and scrutinizes the dominant usage of the term. Thus, the question arises how different forms of democracy relate to populism. It is argued that populism is no external force to liberal democracy’s temporal structures but rather deeply committed to them. After all, the paper denies the term populism to capture and describe radical forms of protest transcending the representation-populism nexus (e.g. Indignad@s, OccupyWallStreet). Instead it pleads for describing radical performances of democracy as presentist instead of populist.