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Smoke from burning tyres and garbage drifted amid the rumble of horns as more than a thousand farmers on mud-caked tractors rolled into Brussels at the end of January 2024. Bundled against the cold, hands calloused, their angry faces lit by scattered fires, they stood guard at barricades awaiting EU leaders, who would meet the next day to decide billions in aid to Ukraine.

Viktor Orbán, the Prime Minister of Hungary, appeared among them: walking between tractors, shaking hands in the twilight, his silhouette outlined by protest banners. “It is Europe’s mistake not to take the voice of the people seriously,” he declared, calling for a new “elite” to rule the EU. It was more than a political photo-op ahead of the European elections in the coming months.

It was a stage for a story.

Here, the characters had already been cast under Hungary’s script: European farmers as betrayed, the Commission as villain, Orbán as their champion. The storyline? Not about evidence, the climate crisis, or the rules of EU policymaking processes, but raw messages and stark definitions of characters: stop unfair competition, avoid regulation that kills European agriculture, replace leaders who do not understand. EU policy on agriculture became an emotional narrative struggle even if, contrary to his own discourse that evening, Orbán lifted his veto on Ukraine aid the following day.

But, as our research reveals, that’s already the story’s conclusion. We investigated how Hungary’s government dismantled a highly technical EU policy using emotional storytelling. That policy, which drove angry farmers to protest between 2023 and 2024, is the European Union’s Farm to Fork Strategy (F2F). Launched in 2020 with high ambitions, it aimed to reshape Europe’s food system into something more sustainable, healthier, climate-friendly. Its targets were bold. These included halving pesticide use, slashing fertilisers, curbing antibiotics in farming, and boosting organic production to cover a quarter of EU farmland by 2030.

By 2024, however, most of that ambition stalled, or was shelved. Farmers’ protests, geopolitical shocks such as the war in Ukraine, and rising food prices eroded political support. One of the fiercest opponents of the strategy was Hungary. And Prime Minister Orbán’s government seized on every opportunity to craft a counter-narrative.

While that evening in Brussels was a single anecdotal episode, we analysed four years’ worth of Hungarian storytelling: we built a corpus of 53 statements and declarations from the Hungarian government on F2F between 2020 and 2024. We broke down these texts, published by official government channels in English, into 794 individual sentences. Each one was coded for its narrative structure first, then for the emotional content. This dual coding (narrative and emotional) was carried out first by human researchers, then benchmarked against MORES Pulse, our project’s custom-built large language model, fine-tuned to detect moral emotions in text.

Then, to guide our analysis, we used the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), which views public policy not just as a matter of interests, but also as a discursive representation of reality. Policy narratives in politics serve the purpose of communicating, persuading, and eliciting emotions.

As it goes, policy narratives come with familiar ingredients:

  • Setting
  • Characters (heroes, villains, victims, sometimes allies, and beneficiaries),
  • Plots (chains of cause and effect),
  • Morals (calls to action), and,
  • Doomsday scenarios (all the bad things that will happen if the call to action is ignored).

We are especially interested in characters, because they are fertile ground for emotional appeals.

Hungary’s Story: David vs. Brussels Goliath

Our data define a clear pattern. Hungary’s government consistently cast itself as the hero, as the defender of European farmers against the overbearing villain of “Brussels.” Farmers are the victims, portrayed as powerless in the face of impossible sustainability targets, rising costs, and unfair competition from Ukrainian grain imports.

From the very beginning, Hungary’s narrative on the F2F was blunt and uncompromising. In May 2020, the country’s Minister for Agriculture, István Nagy, said that the Green Deal was nothing less than a “death sentence for European agriculture.” This doomsday framing became a recurring motif.

But unlike the European Commission’s formal and technical style, Hungary’s counter-narrative was light on evidence and heavy on emotion. They hammered the same themes repeatedly: F2F was unrealistic, harmful to farmers, and detached from economic reality. When references to data appeared, it was usually to trap the Commission in its own rhetoric of evidence-based policymaking, for example highlighting the absence of a full impact assessment for F2F as proof of hypocrisy (the EU usually performs such an assessment for its policies but not for strategies like F2F, where the assessment is carried out later through individual legislative initiatives).

Mapping Emotions onto Policy Narratives

The analysis shows that more than half (55%) of Hungary’s sentences carried emotional content—an unusually high rate for official government communication. And when focusing just on characters (heroes, villains, victims), emotionalisation reached 83%. Here are the key highlights:

  • Heroes (Hungary itself) are associated with pride, enthusiasm, and hope, reflecting resilience and determination.
  • Villains (the Commission, “Brussels,” Green parties, big agribusiness) trigger anger and frustration.
  • Victims (farmers) overwhelmingly elicit fear and empathy, underscoring their vulnerability.
  • Morals (policy calls) often project hope, suggesting that halting or postponing F2F would protect farmers and safeguard Europe’s future.

Interestingly, positive and negative emotions are nearly balanced overall (24.9% vs 23.2%), contradicting our assumption that populist opposition would lean overwhelmingly negative.

Our working paper, available below, highlights an underexplored dimension of EU policymaking: even in highly technical domains such as food regulation, emotional policy narration is prominent. Stage manager and director of its own drama, Hungary turned F2F into a populist battleground, leveraging fear, pride, and anger to undermine what began as a scientific, evidence-driven initiative.

One important conclusion is that one cannot understand EU politics, populist resistance, and even the fate of ambitious strategies like F2F without considering the role of moral emotions such as anger, fear, or pride in political communication.

Because staged dramas stick and resonate. For the EU, this raises a dilemma, which the MORES project continues to scientifically explore: should Brussels meet emotional narratives with their own emotionally compelling counter-narrative, or cling to the language of the treaties and evidence?

Meet the Authors

Jonathan Kamkhaji is a MORES researcher at European University Institute, in Florence.

Claudio Radaelli, an expert in public policy, leads MORES's Italian team at European University Institute. Learn more about him on our Experts page.

Download Information

Kamkkhaji, J., & Radaelli, C. (2025). Patterns of Emotionalisation in Policy Narratives. MORES Working Paper Series, 3. Download this open-access MORES publication here.

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