The article explores party-based populist and radical right looking at the cases of Latvia's National Alliance (NA) and of the Estonian Conservative People's Party (EKRE). The research question is: How does the intersection between the specificities of party-systems and particularistic identity-politics either facilitate or complicate the political engagements of EKRE and NA? This piece demonstrates that whereas the Latvian party-system provides the opportunity structure for the inclusion of NA as a legitimate partner into the government coalition, Estonia's mainstream political parties keep on excluding EKRE from the halls of power. This occurrence is highly subject to the different ways that the two-party systems have been dealing with parties suspected of pro-Kremlin leanings (Estonia: Eesti Keskerakond/Centre Party; Latvia: Saskaņa/Harmony). Meanwhile, the socio-psychological campaigns of both EKRE and NA over immigration and the refugee crisis tend to interlink these two policy-areas with the collective memories of 'colonization' under the Soviets and the collective anxieties of becoming 'colonized' again by others. This socio-psychological strategy has enabled both parties to augment their public appeal.

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The euro crisis is increasingly affecting the political debate in the European Union. Exogenously determined power shifts and institutional changes have been imposed on a number of member states. These measures and the direct intervention of external stakeholders in the key realms of domestic politics pose a serious challenge to both the EU's cohesiveness and its democratic nature. This study looks at how the voting dynamics and the government/opposition-like alignments in the European Parliament are affected by the ongoing crisis. It highlights the balance of partisan and nationally driven factors behind legislators' choices related to the management of the crisis. To capture the impact of the crisis-related debate on the actors' cohesiveness and alignments, two sets of vote-based analyses are conducted. This analysis proves that the main determinant of legislators' alignments in crisis-related debates is membership of the eurozone, while the explanatory potential of factors such as ideology and partisanship appears residual.