The increased availability of political information and the occurrence of worldwide crises has led to a rise in populism. While several explanations for increased populist support have been put forward, less is known about future development once populists are in office. In this paper, we develop a model with rationally inattentive voters and investigate how an office seeking politician designs a political platform in the presence of an incumbent who offers a simple populistic policy. We show that the following factors could force a politician to propose an extreme platform: limited political power, high uncertainty, and low cost of information. While the first two factors predictably decrease politician's chances of being elected, we show that cheaper information does not always benefit an extremist politician. Thus, when voters' uncertainty about the future state of the world is high, a politician benefits from cheaper information. In contrast, when uncertainty is low, a politician prefers the information to be less attainable. Finally, we show that, when voters are completely uncertain, even the slightest change in the likelihood of a possible future situation can switch a politician's political agenda from one extreme to another.