Sympathy towards Ukraine in the Rhetoric of the Hungarian and Polish Prime Ministers

The final speaker on this third day of IAMCR 2023 is Gabriella Szabó, whose focus is on sympathy towards Ukraine in political rhetoric in Poland and Hungary. While usually there are considerable similarities in political rhetoric across the two countries, this is not true when it comes to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces: the governments of the two countries responded very differently to the invasion.

This divergence can be captured by examining the change in political rhetoric following the invasion. The key aspect to examine here is sympathy, which is itself the foundation for solidarity and moral behaviour. Solidarity is the outcome of the publicly visible sympathetic interactions by members of the political elite, which inform ordinary citizens about why they should care about the issue and what should be done for the victims.

How did politicians across the two countries utilise sympathy, then? Sympathy requires three agents: the entity who is principally concerned (Ukraine, including its leaders and people), the entity who is principally acting (Russia), and the (ideally, but not always) neutral spectator who comes to adopt a sympathetic worldview (Hungary and Poland, as represented by their political leaders; as well as other countries’ leaders).

The present study gathered the Facebook posts from the Polish and Hungarian PMs’ pages in the first six weeks after the start of the invasion. This identified unifying, supportive, and antagonistic dimensions within these posts. The Polish PM posted considerably more expressions of sympathy than the Hungarian PM; while some sympathy also appears in the Hungarian PM’s post, there was less expression of interest and care. This was especially pronounced after the Bucha massacre was revealed; the Hungarian PM posted no messages of sympathy in the following days whatsoever.

The Polish PM thus showed the full range of sympathetic responses, and this mirrors Polish responses overall, while the Hungarian PM paid less attention, focussed more on agonistic and unifying dimensions, focussed more on what supporting actions would not be taken, and defined very narrowly to whom his sympathies were be directed, in an effort to minimise sympathy towards Ukraine.