Spain, Germany and Italy: Europe’s Democracies Under Strain

Analysis · Europe

The most consequential job of a mature democracy is not winning elections. It is the dull, painful internal work between them.

Courts have to judge crimes that frighten everyone, and parliaments have to confront prime ministers their own constituents elected. Electoral rules have to be reopened because politics has changed and the old rules no longer fit.

The test of an institution is not whether it does this work. The test is how it does it, and whether the rest of the political system trusts what comes out the other side.

Three of Europe’s largest democracies did all three jobs this week. Spain dragged its prime minister into an awkward parliamentary moment.

Germany sentenced a Saudi doctor for a Christmas-market massacre. Italy advanced an electoral-law overhaul that opposition leaders are calling authoritarian.

The forty-eight hours of June twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth, 2026, were a real-time stress test of European institutional capacity. The results are mixed.

Spain’s parliament drew a line, then admitted it could not enforce it

On Thursday June twenty-fifth, the Spanish Congress voted 178 to 171 to demand that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez submit himself to a vote of confidence or resign.

The motion was filed by the conservative Popular Party. It was carried by the votes of the far-right Vox, and decisively by the seven votes of the Catalan independentist party Junts, which had been the silent partner of the Sánchez minority government since the 2023 election.

This was Junts breaking with the government for the first time in a vote of significant symbolic weight. It was a parliament telling its prime minister that the assumption of confidence on which his minority cabinet rests had eroded.

It was also non-binding. Under the 1978 Spanish constitution, only the prime minister can call a confidence vote, and only a successful constructive motion of no confidence in the Congress can force him out.

The motion of confidence is the prime minister’s tool, not the parliament’s. The constructive motion of no confidence is the parliament’s tool, but it requires a candidate to replace the sitting prime minister and a majority for that candidate, neither of which the opposition currently has.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the Popular Party leader, called Thursday’s vote “decisive” and said it “will go down in the history of Spanish parliamentarism.” Sánchez left the chamber smiling and his ministers dismissed the result as a “tantrum.”

The truth is in between. The parliament drew a line, and the prime minister observed that the line did not bind him.

The Spanish system is functioning as designed. A minority government dependent on a fragmented coalition has been told by a majority of the chamber that the coalition has frayed.

The prime minister can ignore the message at his political peril, or take it as a signal to either call early elections or seek new arrangements with the parties that abandoned him. The vote does not break the institution; it does not even break the government.

What it does is force the question of whether Spanish politics still has a centre of gravity. The current parliament, elected in 2023 with the assumption that the Socialist-Sumar coalition could govern with regional support, has reached the point where the regional support has become its own veto player.

That is not a failure of the institution. It is the institution working at the limit of what it was built for.

Germany’s court did the heaviest possible work without flinching

On Friday June twenty-sixth, the Magdeburg state court sentenced Taleb Jawad al-Abdulmohsen, a fifty-one-year-old Saudi psychiatrist, to life imprisonment for the December 2024 car-ramming attack on the city’s Christmas market.

Al-Abdulmohsen was convicted of six counts of murder and 338 counts of attempted murder. The court found his guilt to be of “particularly severe culpability,” a designation that under German law makes parole after the usual fifteen-year minimum nearly impossible to obtain.

Five women aged forty-five to seventy-five and a nine-year-old boy died in the attack. Investigators established that the defendant drove a rented BMW X3 sport utility vehicle at speeds of up to forty-eight kilometres per hour through a crowd that had no time to clear his path.

The trial that produced the verdict ran for eight months. Al-Abdulmohsen, an anti-Islam activist with documented sympathies for the far-right Alternative for Germany party, was an asylum-claimant doctor employed at a Bernburg secure psychiatric hospital for mentally ill offenders at the time of the attack.

His testimony in court was, by the assessment of observers, repeatedly incoherent and saturated with conspiracy theories. He went on hunger strike at one point and forced the court to continue without him.

The German legal system processed all of this. It assembled the evidence; it heard the defendant in his confused entirety; it accepted the participation of more than three hundred joint plaintiffs represented by approximately forty lawyers in a specially built temporary courtroom; and it produced a verdict that the country could read in the morning paper.

The work was done with the patience and procedural seriousness that the situation demanded. That is the German judiciary at its most functional.

The political surrounding of the case is harder to celebrate. The Magdeburg attack reshaped German politics months before the February 2025 general election, in which Alternative for Germany finished second with a record 20.8 percent of the vote.

Saxony-Anhalt, of which Magdeburg is the capital, holds a state election in September 2026, and the AfD is leading in opinion polling there for the first time. As his trial began last November, al-Abdulmohsen displayed a laptop in the courtroom with the date “Sept 2026” on its screen.

The court could not control any of that. What it could control was the integrity of the legal process that produced today’s verdict.

It controlled what it could, and it did the work. That is the meaning of institutional resilience.

Italy is in the middle of the harder case

Italy is doing something more politically delicate than either of the other two. The Meloni coalition — Fratelli d’Italia, Forza Italia and Lega — is rewriting the country’s electoral law in time for the next general election, currently scheduled for 2027.

The reform replaces the current Rosatellum system, a mixed proportional-and-majoritarian law dating to 2017, with a substantially more proportional model. The proposed system carries a three percent threshold for parliamentary entry, agreed with the centrist Action party of Carlo Calenda to keep him at the centre rather than absorbed by the broad opposition camp.

It carries a majority prize of fifty-five percent of the seats for any coalition that crosses forty percent of the vote. And it carries a requirement that any new party seeking the ballot collect five hundred thousand signatures of support — a provision designed, by the reporting consensus, to keep former general Roberto Vannacci’s hard-right Futuro Nazionale movement off the next ballot.

Vannacci broke from Matteo Salvini’s Lega earlier in 2026. His new movement polls at roughly three percent, just at the threshold the reform creates.

His three percent comes from voters Meloni would otherwise have. The Popular Front of Italian Politics has done the arithmetic and concluded that any electoral system that allows Vannacci to enter parliament is one that takes seats from the centre-right.

The five-hundred-thousand-signature requirement is therefore the precise lever the coalition has chosen to pull. Edoardo Ziello, a former Lega lawmaker who defected to Futuro Nazionale, called the requirement “absurd.”

The opposition Democratic Party, the Five Star Movement and the Greens-Left Alliance have called the entire reform “authoritarian.” The PD’s leader, Elly Schlein, has framed it as a government changing the rules of the game because it fears losing under the current ones.

The Meloni coalition argues, on the public record, that the reform produces a more proportional and stable system. Italy has changed its electoral law five times since 1993, and each change has been accompanied by similar accusations.

The reform has not yet passed; the draft is going through parliamentary committee, and the government wants it ready before the summer recess. But the architecture of what is being proposed is clear, and so is the political logic.

Whether the institutions are bending or holding

This is the interesting question. Each of the three cases looks at first glance like an institution doing what it is built to do.

The Spanish parliament passed a motion, the German court issued a verdict, and the Italian parliament is processing a reform through the normal procedural channels.

In none of the three cases has anyone broken the rules. In all three cases, the result is a public democratic act that the country, including those who lose by it, can interpret as legitimate.

The harder question is whether the legitimacy of the act fully captures the legitimacy of the institution. That is a different test.

The Spanish parliament drew a line that it cannot enforce. The German court delivered a verdict in a case that the country has already used to push politics far to the right of where the verdict itself sits.

The Italian parliament is using the constitutional machinery of electoral reform to fence out a movement that is, on the public evidence, three percentage points of voters legally entitled to organise themselves. None of these is a failure of due process.

All three are signs that the political pressure on the institutions has risen to a level where the institutions can only buy time, not provide closure. That is not the same as breaking; it is what bending looks like.

The counter-case, taken seriously

There is a strong reply: the line between institutions at work and institutions captured is genuinely hard to draw in real time, and calling reform-by-due-process a kind of capture risks delegitimising the only lawful method of democratic change. Post-war West Germany built a five-percent threshold precisely to keep extremist parties out of parliament, and most historians count that as a foundation of its stability.

Italy has rewritten its voting law five times since 1993 without lasting damage.

The sceptical reading still deserves space. A democracy that rewrites the ballot every five years has a less stable institutional grammar than one that does not, and a court that works flawlessly while the politics around it drift toward extremism is not, in the end, holding the line.

The institutions hold in the short term; the open question is the long one.

Why Latin America should read this carefully

The continent has its own version of all three problems. Mexico under Sheinbaum is in the middle of a judicial reform that will reshape the relationship between the executive and the courts; the Brazilian Supreme Court has been an active political actor for fifteen years; Colombia’s Constitutional Court has shaped social policy in ways the legislature has been unable to; Chilean politics is still digesting the consequences of two failed constitutional rewrites.

The Argentine parliament under Milei has rewritten political rules through emergency decrees that the courts have only partially restrained. Across the region the question of whether institutions are working, or are bending toward something else, is the active question of the decade.

The lesson Europe is offering this week is not that institutions always hold. It is that the difference between an institution holding and an institution being captured can be invisible from inside.

That is the harder thing to see, and it is the thing Latin American democracies will have to learn to see for themselves. The continent has the experience and the institutional knowledge to do it.

It is not yet clear that it has the political space.

Frequently asked questions

What happened in Spain’s parliament?

On June 25, 2026, the Congress voted 178-171 to demand Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez call a confidence vote or resign, with the Catalan party Junts breaking from his minority government. The motion is non-binding, since only the prime minister can call such a vote.

What was the Magdeburg verdict?

A German court sentenced a Saudi-born psychiatrist to life imprisonment for the December 2024 Christmas-market car-ramming, convicting him of six murders and 338 attempted murders with “particularly severe culpability.” The eight-month trial gave the defendant full procedural protections.

Why do critics call Italy’s electoral reform authoritarian?

Meloni’s coalition is moving to a more proportional system that adds a 500,000-signature hurdle for new parties, widely read as a way to keep the breakaway hard-right Vannacci movement, polling near 3%, off the ballot. Supporters say it simply makes the system more proportional and stable.