Democracy without credit

The current malaise of democracy admits no euphemisms. The institutions that uphold it have lost the trust of the majority of citizens they are supposed to represent. The data, accumulated survey after survey, depict an erosion that is not conjunctural but structural, and which connects with the crisis of the liberal democratic model throughout the West, but which in Spain adopts its own and particularly worrying forms.

According to the OECD survey on trust in public institutions, only 37% of Spaniards declare high or moderately high trust in the Government, below the average of the thirty countries analyzed. But the truly alarming figure is that of political parties: only 18% of the population trust them. Justice offers no refuge: a Funcas report from February 2026 states that distrust in the judiciary has grown by eight points since 2023, and according to a CIS survey from 2025, 71.5% of Spaniards rate it as a public service. In Catalonia, the latest CEO Barometer, from November 2025, shows government ratings not reaching 5 out of 10. The monarchy is the institution that generates the least trust, with 1.8 out of 10. We are in a downward spiral.

But surveys, however stubborn, do not explain discontent on their own. To understand the depth of discredit, one must look at how people live. The crisis of institutional legitimacy is not just a problem of perception: it is the result of a growing distance between what politics promises and what daily life offers, and the situation of young people is a good example. In Spain, 85.5% of young people between 16 and 29 years old have not emancipated themselves, a historic record. The youth emancipation rate has fallen to 14.5%, and the average age to become independent is now over 30 years old. Youth wages have risen by 10.8% since 2008, while rents have risen by 54%. A young salaried person would have to allocate more than 100% of their net salary to pay rent. Housing has ceased to be an element of stability to become a factor of impoverishment: 29.3% of young people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, and having higher education or a job no longer provides guarantees. The family continues to be, in some cases, the element that serves as a buffer for this set of circumstances.

When material life degrades without clear answers, democratic institutions lose their consideration as a protection mechanism, and if constant hypothetical or real situations of corruption and mismanagement are added, then the idea that politics is a kind of closed club where a few discuss among themselves how power is distributed gains ground. Politics is experienced as a distant, irritating, and sterile spectacle. And it is not an entirely unjust perception: the system has tolerated for decades a certain impunity of the powerful that fuels this reading. The case of the emeritus king is its most stark expression, but the problem is systemic: former presidents on boards of directors of regulated companies, revolving doors without cooling-off periods, non-existent regulation of lobbying, party financing that generates unsavory episodes.

In this credibility vacuum, the judiciary has ended up assuming a prominence that exceeds its usual functions. Faced with politics' inability to resolve its own conflicts and the growing sense of institutional paralysis, judges have positioned themselves as arbiters of disputes that are more political than legal. The judicialization of the Catalan conflict was the paradigmatic example, but the dynamic has become generalized: endless investigations, decisions coinciding with electoral calendars, magistrates becoming constant protagonists. The result is a judiciary trapped in polarization, which has gradually ceased to be perceived as an impartial guarantor to become another actor in the conflict. And every judicial decision read through a partisan lens deepens the erosion.

When all this is projected onto the political map, the panorama darkens. The available governing alternative is a PP-Vox coalition that for many represents the antithesis of regeneration: a rollback in rights, a centralism hostile to plurinationality, rhetoric that capitalizes on the collapse of trust instead of combating it. Without going to the most stark voice of Abascal, one only needs to recall those statements by Feijóo where he ended up stating that democracy and prosperity were not compatible, approaching Peter Thiel of Palantir when he said that democracy and freedom cannot go together. Progressive forces and defenders of plurality and the rule of law find themselves in an uncomfortable dilemma: criticizing institutions is essential to reforming them, but doing so without a credible proposal risks playing into the hands of those who want an increasingly restricted democracy. The way forward lies in connecting the institutional regeneration agenda with people's material living conditions: it is not enough to reform the CGPJ or regulate lobbying if, at the same time, it is not guaranteed that working allows one to live with dignity. In times of systemic crisis, defending democracy cannot just mean defending the

status quo, it must, by necessity, mean transforming it from below, so that it gives meaning to what Article 9.2 of the Constitution solemnly states: “The public authorities shall promote the conditions for freedom and equality to be real and effective”.