Nonlocal material response distinctively changes the optical properties of nano-plasmonic scatterers and waveguides. It is described by the nonlocal hydrodynamic Drude model, which - in frequency domain - is given by a coupled system of equations for the electric field and an additional polarization current of the electron gas modeled analogous to a hydrodynamic flow. Recent attempt to simulate such nonlocal model using the finite difference time domain method encountered difficulties in dealing with the grad-div operator appearing in the governing equation of the hydrodynamic current. Therefore, in these studies the model has been simplified with the curl-free hydrodynamic current approximation; but this causes spurious resonances. In this paper we present a rigorous weak formulation in the Sobolev spaces . H(curl) for the electric field and . H(div) for the hydrodynamic current, which directly leads to a consistent discretization based on Nédélec's finite element spaces. Comparisons with the Mie theory results agree well. We also demonstrate the capability of the method to handle any arbitrary shaped scatterer. © 2012 Elsevier Inc.