BERLIN, Germany (PNN) - August 29, 2012 - The euro zone is running out of bailout cash, and the German Constitutional Court now holds the fate of Europe in its hands.

The European Financial Stability Facility, the original euro area bailout fund established in the summer of 2010, has about 248 billion euros of lending capacity remaining after accounting for existing bailouts for Greece, Portugal, and Ireland.

Spain and Italy - the next two countries expected to be in line for bailouts - could have combined financing needs as large as 703 billion euros over the next two years, according to Citi estimates, dwarfing the existing capacity of the EFSF.

Those huge numbers underscore the need for the additional firepower of the European Stability Mechanism, the new bailout fund expected to replace the EFSF and make available hundreds of billions of euros in additional lending capacity to struggling member states.

However, the ESM has yet to be ratified, which has many counting their chickens before the eggs have hatched, so to speak.

The 16 judges that sit on the Federal Constitutional Court of Germany need to sign off on the fund's constitutionality in order to make the fund operational - and the Court is widely expected to do just that when they deliver a ruling on ESM ratification on September 12.

Even though the Court is widely expected to approve ESM ratification - and the German Bundestag parliamentary body already approved it by a 3/4 majority - what is behind murmurs of caution among analysts and investors?

The constitutionality of the ESM treaty - which is what the Court is set to rule on - is a matter of question in Germany. Several complaints regarding constitutionality have already been lodged against the ESM to the Court.

Germany’s Constitutional Court is increasingly becoming a forum for Euro-skeptic voices to articulate their arguments from a constitutional point of view. These will likely not be the last constitutional complaints on Economic and Monetary Union politics in Germany.

It remains to be seen whether the Court will remain as constructive as in its previous judgments, weighing democratic legitimacy carefully against considerations of systemic stability and capacities of other constitutional bodies.