Ressentiment: The Emotional Engine of Populist Nationalism

The recent global resurgence of populist nationalism poses a critical challenge to the European project and liberal democracies more broadly. Drawing on nationally representative data from a three-wave survey across 12 EU countries conducted through the PLEDGE Horizon Europe project, this paper investigates the emotional foundations of nationalist-populist sentiment. Central to our analysis is a novel operationalization of ressentiment—a complex emotional mechanism that transmutes perceived injustices, relative deprivation, humiliation, and lack of political efficacy into socially destructive emotions such as rage, anger, and righteous indignation. We conceptualize ressentiment as the affective engine of grievance politics, propelling individuals to externalize blame toward demonized “Others.” At the individual level, we find that ressentiment is a strong predictor of negative emotional responses and exclusionary attitudes. Crucially, it is also significantly associated with forms of national identity characterized by collective narcissism—an exaggerated yet brittle belief in national superiority. Our findings show how ressentiment aligns with reactionary political orientations that idealize a mythologized national past and reject pluralistic or cosmopolitan futures. These emotional and identity dynamics appear to shape political attitudes and fuel collective mobilizations toward populist and far-right agendas. Beyond exclusionary nationalism, ressentiment emerges as a key predictor of support for extreme politics, historical revisionism, and resistance to democratic and inclusive norms. This paper contributes to a growing literature on the affective dimensions of nationalism, highlighting the pivotal role of emotion in the political psychology of populism, and its wider implications for democratic resilience in Europe and beyond.