Much cross-sectional scholarly work has been done on the causes of radical-right wing populist movements in western Europe, but much less has been done on both left-wing populist parties and Europe’s peripheral states. This paper engages both shortcomings through a two-stage quantitative and qualitative approach and finds that unemployment is a most likely cause of left-wing electoral success for all European democracies regardless of geographical location. Moreover, the assumption that immigrants breed right-wing success is challenged. This paper instead finds their achievements to be contingent on the political strategies employed by the center. For ethno-territorial and xenophobic parties to succeed, there first must be adversarial engagement of their issue from the established middle, otherwise, their issue is not made salient in the public’s eyes.
