Too Good to be True

In the 2019 and 2024 European Parliament campaigns, Hungarian political actors posted content heavy with pride—and were rewarded for it. Pride-based Facebook posts generated significantly higher engagement than other content across both elections. In Germany, the opposite held: non-emotive communication outperformed emotional appeals. Pride, in that context, registered as inappropriate self-praise. Poland sat between the two, with moderate, stable engagement that reflected neither a strong appetite nor a clear resistance to the emotion.

Hungary, Germany, and Poland are the three countries at the centre of a new MORES analysis—selected because, together, they represent three distinct configurations of democratic culture and emotional politics in contemporary Europe. This cross-national variation is not simply a difference in communication style. Where pride dominates and consistently mobilises, something more than confidence is at work.

Pride is a moral emotion. It derives force from social recognition: we feel proud of things that matter to our community, not merely to ourselves. In campaign settings, this gives it unusual persuasive power. It signals legitimacy without requiring argument. It activates belonging without demanding reflection. “We are doing well,” “we represent what is right”; these formulations pass credibility quietly, through feeling, before the voter has engaged the underlying claim.

Its darker variant—hubristic pride—is more than celebration. It ranks. Where authentic pride signals individual or shared achievement, hubris asserts collective superiority. Excessive pride is not simply more pride; it is a qualitative shift. The community stops being a group of people who accomplished something together and becomes a moral elite confronting a moral underclass. What looks like enthusiasm is, structurally, arrogance.

Hubris licenses simplification and punishes the kind of political communication that requires the voter to think.

Because pride is a complex moral emotion, detecting it at scale requires more than keyword searches. MORES built a fine-tuned, multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model capable of identifying pride expressions at sentence level across three languages and two election cycles. The results differ sharply by country. (Download the open-access research below.)

In Hungary, pride-based posts generated significantly higher engagement—likes, shares, comments—than other content in both elections. This is not incidental. It reflects a political culture in which emotional communication is strongly rewarded, and in which pride, blended with grievance and moral superiority, functions less as one register among many than as the dominant one. Hubris, here, is not an excess; it is the style.

What makes this curious is who is using it. By 2024, Fidesz expressed pride at the lowest levels of any party in the sample. Opposition and newcomer parties had taken up the emotional grammar their opponents had built.

Germany presents something close to the opposite. In 2019, non-emotive posts outperformed pride-based messages; by 2024 the gap had narrowed, but pride still showed no clear advantage. Emotional restraint and factual tone carry normative weight in German political culture.

In Poland, pride-based communication produced moderate, stable engagement across both elections—neither strongly mobilising nor clearly rejected. The results for Germany and Poland suggest that this dynamic is country-specific, and that Hungarian political culture is shaped so thoroughly by affective polarisation that even the challengers had started to speak its language.

The problem is not pride alone but what it combines with. When paired with anger and grievance, it no longer expresses collective achievement; it becomes a moral response to perceived humiliation. The sequence runs: grievance → pride → hubris. Suffering is transformed into superiority. Political actors who can perform this conversion gain something valuable: the ability to channel injury into dominance, and to present that dominance as justice.

This is the “hubristic shift” that matters for European democracy. Not pride itself, which can anchor shared purpose and motivate civic participation. But the moment pride fuses with grievance and turns outward (toward enemies, the disloyal, the morally contaminated other) it begins to do the opposite of what democratic politics requires. Pluralism depends on the assumption that disagreement is legitimate. Hubristic pride denies this by design. It converts political competition into moral war.

There is a quieter consequence too. When the emotional register runs high enough, leaders can bypass the harder work of persuasion; the technocratic complexity, the difficult trade-off, the policy that requires citizens to accept uncertainty rather than exultation. Over time, hubris licenses simplification and punishes the kind of political communication that requires the voter to think.

The danger for liberal democracy is not that citizens feel proud. It is what pride becomes once it absorbs enough anger and grievance—and how the resulting emotion redraws the boundaries of who belongs.

Meet the Author

Learn more about Gabriella Szabó, MORES's Deputy Principal Investigator and Senior Research Fellow at ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, Hungary, on our Experts page.

Download Information

Szabó, Gabriella and Ring, Orsolya and Beichelt, Timm and Lipiński, Artur (2026) Pride and Hubris in European Parliament Campaigns. The cases of Germany, Hungary, and Poland in 2019 and 2024. MORES Working Paper Series, 4. Download this open-access MORES publication here.

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