[OC] Sentiment of 24.5 million Reddit posts across 40 European country subreddits. Every country is net negative.

Source: Arctic Shift (bulk Reddit archive), Feb 2025 to Feb 2026, posts and comments from 40 European country subreddits.

Tools: Python, twitter-xlm-roberta-base-sentiment-multilingual for sentiment, xlm-emo-t for emotion detection, BERTopic for topic modeling, matplotlib and geopandas for the map.

Scored each post/comment from -1 (negative) to +1 (positive), weighted by upvotes (log1p). Filtered 40+ known bots. Corrected for a negative bias the sentiment model has on non-English text.

Most negative: UK (-0.524), Germany (-0.472), Portugal (-0.432), France (-0.430), Italy (-0.430). Least negative: Latvia (-0.075), Estonia (-0.093), Hungary (-0.104).

Latvia is the only country where "joy" is the dominant emotion instead of "anger". The UK has 6.17 negative posts for every positive one. Germany has the highest anger percentage at 61.3%.

I also measured self-image (sentiment when a country mentions itself). Montenegro is the only one with a positive score. Most self-critical: Croatia (-0.604), UK (-0.507), Portugal (-0.444).

Full album with rankings, country profile cards, mention network, and timeline: https://imgur.com/a/1CC2C83

Word clouds for all 40 countries: https://imgur.com/a/eX11J13

Caveats: Reddit skews young, urban, male, tech-savvy. Sarcasm detection is bad. Sample sizes vary (UK 2M items, Malta 42K).