Sympathy with Ukraine (or not much)! Using an emotion-based framework of solidarity to understand Mateusz Moravieczki’s and Viktor Orbán’s reactions to the war.

The paper compares and contrasts emotionally grounded solidarity claims in the communication of Prime Minister Mateusz Moravieczki (PL) and Viktor Orbán (HU) in relation to Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine between February 24 and April 2, 2022. As the political leaders of Poland and Hungary express very divergent views on the European responses to the war, the country selection is driven by the logic of most different cases. We conduct a qualitative content analysis on Prime Ministers’ Facebook posts to make the first step forward in investigating the discursive strategies for evoking the feeling of sympathy, the rhetorical tool of increasing solidarity, and how top-level politicians use moral language to mobilize support. We conceptualize solidarity as the process when spectators recognize the bond, objectives, standards, and sympathies with those in need creating a psychological sense of unity in groups. In politics, it is also known as a communicative strategy to justify policies in conflicting times and crises. Inspired by Adam Smith’s concept of Moral Sentiments, we argue that collective solidarity is the outcome of a series of publicly visible sympathetic interactions with verbal and gestural communicative acts. We identify and investigate three dimensions, unifying, supportive and agonistic ones, of emotionally loaded solidarity discourses. First, under the umbrella of the unifying dimension of sympathy-based solidarity we study if and how Prime Ministers create bonds between their countries and representatives of Ukraine, e.g. expressing the way they care about, feel bad/sorry about others’ trouble, grief, or misfortune. Second, as a part of the supportive dimension, we collect data on the proposed acts which should be done on behalf of the persons in need. Third, to study the agonistic dimension special attention is paid to assess if and how Prime Ministers are distancing themselves from the agent who does the harm by condemning the behaviour or denouncing the identity of the villain. Data suggest that there are significant differences between the rhetoric of the Prime Ministers: all dimensions are very strong in the case of Poland while the agonistic one is rather absent in the data on Hungary. When it comes to the unifying dimension PM Moravieczki declares a symmetric, tight-knit relationship and emotional bond between Poland and Ukraine which is not found in the posts of PM Orbán. The subjects of sympathy are narrowly limited to the ordinary people of Ukraine who are represented by mostly children and females through the social media communication of PM Orbán in which he expresses sorrow for their misfortunes. Lastly, the two countries differ from each from the viewpoint of the given support to Ukraine: the Hungarian Prime Minister calls for humanitarian aid in the name of good-heartedness and commiseration while the Polish leader passionately campaigns for a broad range of diplomatic, symbolic, and material, incl. weapons, helps. The results shed some light on the nuanced differences in affective claims of solidarity and contribute to academic knowledge of moral politics. (Co-author: Artur Lipiński Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan)