Political polarization and resentments seem to be escalating once again in Europe and elsewhere. Resentment as a particular way of engaging with the past and repurposing collective memory is not a new sentiment; though recently, it seems to have found a new domain, that is, legal-constitutional politics. Legal resentments are deployed by aspired autocracies to reinterpret and instrumentalize the past, or to polarize and stigmatize the international law and institutions that propose an alternative future, in this case specifically the EU, to justify their resistance and responses to requirements of democratic transitions. This article conducts a critical comparative analysis of political discourse and constitutional texts in Türkiye (AKP) and Hungary (FIDESZ), to explore the legal-institutional reframing of the past and collective traumas and memories beyond the political discourse and demonstrate how it contributes to not only the rise but also the sustenance of autocracies. The main argument here is that legal resentment and constitutional politics of memory are nationalist, reactionary byproducts of and response to global constitutionalism. Besides recurrent discursive appeal to the past, both the AKP and FIDESZ codified certain ideologically curated memories and discourses of victimhood into their constitutions and legal-institutional architecture, in the name of replacing the frameworks of traumatizing historical events that are attributed to the states they claimed to erase and replace. Findings deepen our understanding of the constitutional democratic crisis in similar contexts, as well as the dangers of instrumentalizing the constitution with a particular appeal to memory politics.