Polarizing Sentimental Storytelling and Affective Polarization: Populist Narrative Constructions of Political Conflict in the French Presidential Elections

This paper examines how affective polarization is produced and intensified through sentimental narrative practices in contemporary populist rhetoric, drawing on the French presidential election campaigns of 2017 and 2022. Building on Oliver Hidalgo’s account of democracy’s constitutive antinomies – such as equality versus liberty, representation versus popular sovereignty, and the principles of quality and quantity in democratic decision-making – I argue that contemporary populist actors exploit these tensions by mobilizing sentimental modes of political communication. Through Polarizing Sentimental Storytelling, populist rhetoric constructs affective meaning structures in which moral judgments, collective identities, and emotional alignments are tightly interwoven, transforming political disagreement into moralized conflict. Integrating current research on affective polarization, the paper shows how sentimental narratives foster antagonistic social alignments among citizens by shaping how political others are perceived, felt, and evaluated. Affective polarization thus emerges not merely as an attitudinal phenomenon, but as an affective and narrative process that reorganizes democratic conflict at the level of social relations and embodied orientations. In this process, core democratic principles are not merely rejected but affectively reconfigured through sentimental framings that bind seemingly egalitarian appeals to exclusionary moral hierarchies and restrictive conceptions of the demos. Empirically, the paper offers a comparative analysis of key campaign speeches by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon during the 2017 and 2022 French presidential elections. Despite being positioned as ideological antagonists, both actors rely on narratives of collective suffering, moral injury, and crisis to construct emotionally charged visions of “the people” and their alleged adversaries. These sentimental framings deploy emotional registers of compassion, moral injury, and shared grievance, producing affective misrecognition: they invite audiences to experience political conflict through affectively charged distinctions between a morally valorized collective and its perceived enemies, thereby intensifying affective polarization across social and political lines. Methodologically, the paper draws on affect studies and ideological critique in the lineage of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Louis Althusser, combined with narrative analysis. I further incorporate Berg et al.’s concept of “Diskurskörper” to show how sentimental communication not only structures discourse but also produces embodied dispositions, shaping how audiences feel, perceive, and inhabit democratic conflicts. This framework illuminates how sentimental narratives affectively configure political perception, collective identity, and normative expectations in ways that reshape the meaning and scope of democratic conflict. By integrating Hidalgo’s theory of democratic antinomies with an analysis of affective narrative practices, the paper offers a conceptual account of how populist actors on both the left and the right contribute to affective polarization through sentimental meaning-making. It contributes to comparative debates on affective polarization by highlighting the emotional, moral, and identity-based foundations of political conflict and by showing how affective polarization reshapes democratic norms and social relations in contemporary electoral politics.