Ritual Closure and Its Refusal: The Collective Processing of Political Defeat on Social Media

Political communities do not merely suffer electoral defeat; they also process it collectively through communication. This study examines whether, and in what form, the ritual work of mourning emerges in the online sphere after a governing-party community loses power. Focusing on the period following the Hungarian parliamentary election of 12 April 2026, and using a constructivist, artificial-intelligence-assisted Grounded Theory procedure, it analyses 13,613 Facebook comments posted beneath the public posts of five political actors on the losing side. The central finding is that the pages examined are not the inward-turning rituals of a mourning community but contested spaces, and that communicative practices associated with mourning work in the classical sense—working through, towards acceptance of the loss—are only marginally visible in them. The place of such work is taken partly by a ritual of deferring closure within the losing community (re-coronation of the leader, the promise of return, sacralization) and partly by a counter-ritual of enforcing closure within the victorious community (reversed humiliation, moral indictment, desacralization). The study conceptualises post-defeat online communication through the middle-range theory of contested closure: the arena is where the parties struggle over whether the loss becomes final and legitimate at all. The results qualify the assumption that the digital sphere is automatically a ritual site of collective mourning.