Protecting collective worth: pride in European parliament campaigns in Germany, Hungary, and Poland

Introduction This article examines how pride functions as an emotional resource of protective politics in European Parliament election campaigns in 2019 and 2024. Focusing on Germany, Hungary, and Poland, we analyse how political actors deploy pride-related textual cues in Facebook campaign discourse to affirm collective worth and symbolically defend the worth of the political community in increasingly contested public spheres. Methods Using a fine-tuned multilingual XLM-RoBERTa model trained on expert-labelled and GPT-generated data, we identify sentence-level pride expressions in Facebook posts published during the ten weeks preceding each election. The classifier achieves accuracy levels above 70% across three languages, enabling large-scale cross-national comparison. Results The findings reveal substantial contextual variation in both the distribution and audience responsiveness to pride. Pride is not systematically structured by parties’ electoral status: both re-elected and newcomer parties may deploy it, although by 2024 its use becomes more selective, with a moderate tendency to concentrate among re-elected actors. The relationship between pride and user engagement is uneven. In Hungary, differences between pride and non-pride posts remain negligible. In Germany, the association is unstable across election cycles. Poland shows the clearest shift, where pride-related posts generate significantly higher engagement in 2024. Discussion These results indicate that pride is not an inherently mobilising campaign emotion, but a context-dependent communicative resource. Pride can function as a resource of collective worth protection by reaffirming achievement, resilience, and moral standing, yet its effectiveness depends on communicative context and audience responsiveness.