Cringe-Based Hostile Communication and Its Democratic Consequences in Hungary’s 2024 Campaigns

This paper investigates the rise of hostile political communication through an analysis of cringe content, a hybrid style combining ridicule, emotional manipulation, and partisan mobilisation. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of seven videos from the Patrióta–Trombi Roast YouTube channel—an influencer platform embedded in Hungary’s pro-government media ecosystem—the study conceptualises how cringe-based hostility operates as a tool of delegitimisation and affective polarisation in a hybrid media regime. Conceptually, the paper builds on superiority theory (Carroll 2014; Lintott 2016), which views humour as an assertion of dominance over its targets, and on the moral psychology of contempt (Bell 2013), which frames contempt as a boundary-making emotion that marks opponents as inferior and unworthy of respect. Cringe communication blends vicarious embarrassment, contempt, and amusement to humiliate adversaries and elevate in-groups. Unlike satire, it functions as symbolic degradation: political conflict becomes entertainment, and opponents become objects of emotional distancing. This aligns with scholarship showing how humour can normalise exclusionary attitudes and delegitimise political rivals (Hodson et al., 2010; Hodson & MacInnis 2016). Methodologically, the paper advances the workshop’s call for innovative approaches by offering a systematic, multimodal coding framework. Cringe communication is modelled as a sequential process linking: expressive cues (awkward displays, failed humour, overconfidence); emotional reactions (vicarious embarrassment, contempt, joyful derision); rhetorical devices (verbal insults, gendered slurs, hyperbolic comparisons) and multimodal features (editing cuts, zoom-ins, emojis, sound effects) with political functions (delegitimisation, in-group bonding, agenda alignment). Two coders applied this framework independently and resolved differences through consensus, ensuring analytic reliability. Treating the full videos as the unit of analysis allows the study to capture not only textual hostility but the affective choreography that structures viewer interpretation. The framework is designed to be extendable longitudinally and compatible with computational tools (e.g., emotion detection, audiovisual feature extraction), thus bridging qualitative and scalable analysis. Empirically, the paper analyses the 2024 European Parliamentary and municipal election campaigns in Hungary, a period marked by scandal, mass protest, and the sudden rise of a challenger party for Fidesz. Trombi’s videos systematically targeted cultural figures, influencers, and opposition politicians through personalised mockery, gendered humiliation, and visual overstylisation. These multimodal attacks reinforced government narratives on gender, the EU, and cultural decline. Each video culminated in explicit or implicit electoral cues, transforming ridicule into political campaigning. Normatively, the study shows how polarising regimes weaponise humour to normalise hostility, deter dissent, and erode pluralistic-deliberative norms. As an outsourced negative campaign tool, cringe communication provides plausible deniability while circulating delegitimising messages as entertainment. References: Carroll, N. (2014). Humour: A very short introduction. Oxford University Press. Hodson, G., & MacInnis, C. C. (2016). Derogating humor as a delegitimization strategy in intergroup contexts. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 2(1), 63–74. https://doi.org/10.1037/tps0000052 Hodson, G., Rush, J., & MacInnis, C. C. (2010). A joke is just a joke (except when it isn’t): Cavalier humor beliefs facilitate the expression of group dominance motives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(4), 660–682. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019627 Lintott, S. (2016). Superiority in humor theory. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 74(4), 347–358. https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12321