We still know very little of how populist governments behave as compared to mainstream governments in Council decision-making. Studying the ‘crucial case’ of negotiations around refugee distribution in the EU, an issue which allows populists to mobilize both anti-EU and anti-immigrant sentiment, we demonstrate that populist governments differ from mainstream ones in three important ways: First, they reject formal and informal rules of Council decision-making if these are not conducive to their preferred outcome; second, they reject traditional means of ensuring compromise such as package-deals and side-payments; third, they reject the final solution and exploit the ensuing deadlock to prove that the EU is weak and dysfunctional. We show that populist governments adopt such a behaviour even when they would benefit from the adoption of a policy solution. However, we expect populists to engage in such political games only when the negative effects of non-decisions are not immediate.