Sharing Political Nostalgia in Hungary. Are Reactionary Messages Successful on Social Media?

Nostalgia is a permanent component of politics in Hungary. Politicians in every camp pick something in the past to appreciate, to prefer to the present, and to long for. For some actors of the political right, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy vanished a long time ago is the desired stage in history, others on the right would like to see the early era of the European project with the idea of ‘Europe of nations’ return in the EU. While the political left wants to turn back to the political conditions before 2010 when Viktor Orbán’s governance started. With the aid of qualitative content analysis, we present the patterns of and allusions to political nostalgia in the social media (Facebook) communication by nine Hungarian political leaders belonging to parties that have qualified to be put on the ballot on May 26, 2019. Data are taken from the EP election campaign period, seven weeks before the election day starting on April 8, 2019, which was the official campaign kick-off. The paper also gives an investigation of the reception of political nostalgia by the citizens who visit the Facebook profiles of the politicians and react to the textual and visual posts there. Citizens’ reaction is measured by metrics of user engagement such as public shares, likes, and comments. We are interested in whether contents filled with political nostalgia provoke more user responses than the other types of Facebook posts. We also collect the emoji reactions to shed some light on the emotional aspect of user engagement related to political nostalgia in Hungary.