Populism is usually read through the leader - through the discourse , style and performance by which a figure gathers 'the people' and casts themselves as the one who speaks for them. But what happens when 'the people' articulate themselves through an image rather than a leader? To answer this question, we examine the appropriation of the Jolly Roger flag from the Japanese anime One Piece in recent protests in Peru and Indonesia, treating it not as meme, ornament or marker of fandom but as a visual artefact through which ordinary actors articulate grievance, opposition and collective identity from below. Drawing together work on populist performance, populist articulation from below, visual politics and the translocal circulation of Japanese popular culture, we argue that global images can become significant political resources when protesters reappropriate them to make themselves visible as a collective subject. In Peru and Indonesia, the Jolly Roger condenses distinct grievances — corruption, repression, elite distance, institutional failure, democratic betrayal — without resolving them into a single program, ideology or doctrine. Its political force lies in its movement: from anime to protest, and from circulation to a shared surface of recognition. Attending to that process shifts the question of populism from what leaders say about 'the people' to how 'the people' assemble themselves, however provisionally, through globally circulating cultural artefacts.
