The term ‘populism’ has gained renewed prominence in Greece during the Eurozone crisis, in both public and academic debates. In this article I conceptualize populism as a discourse of territorial and temporal particularism, which challenges the way a state has been incorporated into the international political and economic system. Based on this definition, I question whether oppositional discourses employed by partisan actors or official power are wholesale and genuine expressions of populism. Thus, I contest the notion that Greece failed due to populism. Instead I draw attention to a failure in the official legitimation of modernization by state elites that long preceded the crisis.