From Recognition to Ressentiment: Anger and Competing Forms of Victimhood in Hungarian and Polish Political Communication

This paper examines the political manifestations of anger-related emotions and their connection to two distinct forms of collective victimhood, paradigmatic and ressentimentful, in Hungary and Poland between 2009 and 2024. As Capelos and Salmela suggest (2026) in paradigmatic victimhood, anger is directed toward a clearly identifiable perpetrator of real harm, such as an oppressor group, individuals who have done objective harm or aggressor in war, and functions as a moral impetus for acknowledgment, reconciliation, and restorative justice. Ressentimentful victimhood, by contrast, thrives on vagueness: it projects blame onto diffuse entities and converts anger into a self-reinforcing moral posture that sustains feelings of superiority and degradation. Conceptually, the study highlights the antagonistic nature of victimhood constructions in politics, showing how similar affective communicative energies of anger can serve integrative functions in paradigmatic victimhood but divisive, polarising purposes in ressentimentful victimhood. Using a mixed-method approach that combines AI-based emotion detection and qualitative hand-coding, the study explores how anger, indignation, and moral outrage are articulated and transformed within grievance-based social media messages of political parties and politicians. The quantitative component employs MORES Pulse, a multilingual large-language-model-based tool developed within the MORES project to detect moral and emotional cues in political texts. The model identifies anger-family emotions in large Facebook corpora of Hungarian and Polish political actors. These emotion-rich texts are subsequently qualitatively coded to classify and interpret expressions of paradigmatic and resentful victimhood. The study addresses three core research questions: (1) How are anger-related emotions distributed and framed across time in Hungarian and Polish political communication? (2) How do political actors construct paradigmatic versus ressentimentful forms of victimhood through emotional language and anger-directed strategies? (3) To what extent do these forms of victimhood contribute to moral inclusion or exclusion in political discourse during heightened political periods (elections, crises)? The longitudinal design enables tracing the evolution of anger-related emotions over time, revealing shifts from justified moral protest to entrenched ressentiment. Comparing Hungary and Poland uncovers how similar historico-political grievances and illiberal trajectories produce distinct emotional regimes and offers broader insights into if and how emotional dynamics sustain democratic erosion and normalise moralised blame. The paper also contributes to theorise victimhood as an emotional–communicative process rather than a fixed identity, and by empirically distinguishing integrative and divisive trajectories of anger manifestations in victimhood discourses. Reference: Salmela, M. & Capelos, T. (forthcoming,).Collective victimhood –the shallow social bond of Ressentiment. In L. Osler & T. Szanto (Eds), For, Against, Together: Antagonistic Political Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.