The in-depth column curated by Michele Muratori, leader of the Libera group, continues its series dedicated to analysing current political affairs, the main institutional challenges, and the topics of greatest interest to the Republic of San Marino.
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In the theatre of contemporary geopolitics, the ballot box retains its peculiar role as a distorting mirror, one that returns an instant image of a country’s tensions without ever offering definitive answers to the structural disorder that generates them.
This 2026 is proving to be not merely a year of intense electoral deadlines, but a genuine stress test for the resilience of both liberal democracies and highly centralised systems.
Across the planet’s many latitudes, citizen disillusionment runs along a common thread, with today’s electorate showing growing impatience toward pre-packaged ideological formulas built on blind allegiance and loyalty, refusing to grant any political force — regardless of ideological leaning — a comfortable incumbency or a blank cheque.
What links geographically and culturally distant realities such as the United States, Israel, Serbia and Brazil is the forceful emergence of younger generations alongside a constant redefinition of the weight carried by minorities.
From American campuses to the student movements of Belgrade, through youth activism in Brazil’s metropolises and the participation of younger generations in Israeli society, young people are asserting themselves as a cross-cutting shock force capable of upending traditional power structures.
At the same time, governments are increasingly stumbling over their inability to represent the demands of ethnic, community and social minorities, whose votes can no longer be treated as a guaranteed reservoir of support or subordinated to paternalistic logic.
The recent setback suffered by Republicans in the American midterm elections offers a vivid illustration of this twofold push, driven decisively by the prominence of Generation Z and the profound shift within the Hispanic electorate.
According to data released by the research centre CIRCLE at Tufts University, young people aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in the House, with a crushing margin of 71% to 25% for Republicans — a clear advantage of +46 points confirming a youth mobilisation of enormous significance.
A mirror-image shift occurred among Latino voters: while in 2024 a sizeable share, estimated at around 48%, had backed the Republican camp, these midterms recorded a drastic reversal, with over 60% of Hispanic votes going to the Democrats.
This about-face does not stem from a sudden ideological conversion to the progressive platform, but from profound material disappointment. The administration’s economic policies and the persistent impact of the cost of living, inflation and essential goods made the original promise of prosperity untenable, leading many Latino families to view government measures as damaging.
Adding further weight to this picture were developments in foreign policy, where exposure on the Iranian front and the resulting crisis in the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices soaring, forcing a country accustomed to relative stability in its supply chain to watch the national average fuel price climb past four dollars a gallon and beyond six dollars in several states — reaching levels and speeds not seen in years (The Guardian).
Compounding this erosion of support, surveys by the Pew Research Center found that the vast majority of Hispanic Democratic supporters pointed to economic hardship and harsh immigration crackdowns, along with the related federal controls, as having directly struck at the family and community networks of the community.
The combination of generational momentum and minority disaffection has shown that identity-driven anger and permanent polarisation are not enough to build a durable governing project without concrete answers on jobs, housing and rights.
The redistribution of parliamentary control and the loss of long-held strongholds indicate that the model of exasperated political confrontation has reached its saturation point. This wave allowed Democrats to wrest several key seats and territories traditionally considered conservative bastions away from Republicans.
In Texas, a longstanding conservative stronghold, Democratic state representative James Talarico secured a historic Senate victory, defeating Attorney General Ken Paxton (The 19th), while Gina Hinojosa won the governorship, beating incumbent Republican Greg Abbott to become the state’s first Latina governor (CBS News).
In Kansas, Adam Hamilton became the first Democrat to win a Senate seat in nearly a century (Central Jersey).
In North Carolina, Democrat Roy Cooper won the open Senate seat, while in South Carolina, Annie Andrews achieved a historic Senate victory, flipping a seat that had been under conservative control since 1998 (PolitiFact).
This clear reversal of fortune delivered a stern punishment vote in a country that remains deeply split in two, yet it also stands as a telling signal for the coming race to the White House in the 2028 elections.
But while American politics shows signs of populist exhaustion, the recent legislative elections in Israel likewise confirm how institutional fragmentation and democratic fatigue can paralyse a country.
The outcome of Israel’s vote produced a sharply fragmented parliament, in which the bloc led by outgoing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stalled at 53 seats, falling short of the absolute majority set at 61 and opening the door to a deep political stalemate.
This result highlights a clear rejection, by a substantial portion of the population, of internal polarisation and the persistent tensions surrounding the country’s democratic future.
Here too, the cross-cutting impact of the youth vote and weariness with political hyperbole combined with the decisive weight of minorities, propelling Arab parties to a historic result of 19 seats overall, making them the kingmaker and an indispensable hinge for any future government (Associated Press).
On the European stage, the fragilities of illiberal or heavily centralised democratic models appear equally evident. The most disruptive development of the continent’s electoral cycle undoubtedly concerns Belgrade, where momentum channelled through a vast youth and student mobilisation — born out of the 2024 Novi Sad railway overpass tragedy — dismantled the entrenched power system of Aleksandar Vučić.
The extraordinary triumph of the Student List, which secured an absolute parliamentary majority with over 53% of the vote, amid record turnout nearing 69%, marked a watershed moment for the entire Balkan region (OSW).
For over a decade, Serbia represented a model of personalist stability and tight control over the media narrative, but the propulsive force of youth has shown that the concentration of state resources offers no permanent immunity once civil society decides to demand the restoration of democratic guarantees, transparency and fundamental freedoms.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the narrow but crucial victory of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil’s presidential run-off confirms a similar trend.
Traditional democratic forces are proving capable of erecting an effective dam against the drift toward right-wing populism, but they then find themselves having to govern societies marked by extreme social and political fragmentation.
Lula secured his mandate at the head of a heterogeneous coalition for democratic salvation, backed largely by urban youth and historically marginalised minorities, united more by the need to safeguard the institutional order than by any shared vision of the future.
The government now faces the complex task of managing public finances and a tense standoff with a Congress dominated by the conservative Centrão bloc and supporters of the sovereigntist right, where the room for structural reform remains narrow and the opposition retains considerable pulling power (Reuters).
The common thread linking the American midterms to the election results in Jerusalem, Belgrade and Brasília reveals an inescapable truth: while populism is proving far from invincible, centrist and progressive forces have yet to craft a truly decisive political and cultural alternative.
Voters, driven by the energy of Generation Z and the cross-cutting dynamism of ethnic, community and social minorities worldwide, are now punishing incompetence, arrogance and overreach by those in power with merciless regularity.
Yet the resulting turnover often resembles a rejection of the status quo more than a convinced embrace of a new vision for the future.
Global democracy is thus entering an age of impatient pragmatism, a time that offers no discounts, where the era of easy consensus built on slogans is inexorably running out in the face of today’s complex challenges.
The warning rising from the ballot boxes of 2026 is clear and urgent, a reminder that democracy is neither a blank cheque nor a legacy that protects itself, but a daily practice of responsibility.
If institutions and new leaders fail to translate citizens’ impatience into material answers and concrete rights, today’s vote risks becoming the harbinger of an even deeper disillusionment.
The resilience of the free world will not be measured by its ability to defeat rivals at the ballot box, but by its capacity to prove that freedom and social justice can still govern.
