The Missing Emotion Narratives and Political Myth of the Demos in the Post-Colonial Social Contract Caged Between the Ethnos and Minorities

In post-colonial Portugal, the “people” invoked in the social contract is not a neutral collective, but a contested political subject oscillating between demos and ethnos—a distinction with direct consequences for how belonging and exclusion are affectively narrated. Within a demos imaginary, “the people” signifies a broad, civic form of belonging that can, at least in principle, move beyond polarisation: belonging is articulated as an affective attachment to an open community, where membership is expandable and political conflict does not automatically translate into moral expulsion. By contrast, an ethnos imaginary rests on a foreclosed understanding of ethnicity and race, in which membership is naturalised, bounded, and more readily mobilised through boundary work against those positioned as not fully belonging. In the Portuguese case, this ethnos-people is historically reinforced by colonial mythology—political myths that narrate national exceptionalism while displacing the emotional costs of empire and decolonisation onto racialised minorities. In short, demos narratives tend to mitigate polarisation between majorities and minorities, whereas ethnos narratives tend to intensify it. Comparing these two understandings of “the people” helps illuminate a core tension at the root of the colonial legacy within the social contract: while democratic language often presumes a demos, the emotion narratives circulating publicly can reproduce an ethnos, leaving the emotional repertoire of the demos underarticulated and minorities persistently cast as the site where national belonging is policed. To examine these dynamics, this paper focuses on two target groups: retornados and most conservative representatives sitting in parliament (MCR - including the far right). Portugal’s recent history includes the internal forced migration of approximately 500,000 retornados following decolonisation in the mid-1970s, shaping how returnees conceptualise the social contract as they integrate into a country different from the one in which they had lived within the same colonial empire. Returnees thus became a minority within their own “country,” while often having occupied the position of the imperial ethnos. More recent political change has been marked by the rise of the far right, characterised by sharper polarisation between “the people” and minorities and by the securitisation of social diversity. These articulations are structured by specific emotion narratives tied to different political mythologies: on the one hand, retornados reveal how the social contract is reshaped through the reframing of an empire into a peripheral European state; on the other,MCR foregrounds Portuguese colonial history while opposing rising migration trends. Through this comparison the paper uncovers the interplay between cognitive and affective signifiers through which Portuguese (and post-colonial European) social values are clarified and the social contract is constructed. Drawing on 30 semi-structured interviews with MCR and retornados, the study proceeds through three nodal points: (1) a theoretical review of post-colonial political mythologies of “the people”; (2) a narrative analysis of emotion-driven conceptualisations of “the people” and minorities in post-colonial social contracts; and (3) a visualisation and comparison of the social contract’s myths and emotions using Cognitive-Affective Maps (CAMs). Finally, the study contributes to understanding how colonial legacies shape (and can intensify) social polarisation within European social contracts.