First of all, the United States does not have only two parties. In addition to the Republican and Democratic parties, there are other parties like the Green party, the Libertarian party, and many others . Most Americans just don't notice them because they are not represented in Congress and their presidential candidates typically get less than 1 % of the national popular vote, although sometimes a third-party candidate gets more than that.
In Europe on the other hand, most countries (if not all) have more than two parties with seats in parliament. In the United Kingdom, however, where members of parliament (MPs) are separately elected by simple majority vote in single-member districts, one of the two major parties, i.e. the Conservative party or the Labour party, normally wins an outright majority of seats in the House of Commons and forms the government alone. In that scenario, the smaller parties like the Liberal Democrats, or the Scottish Nationalists, have in practice very little national influence and the system becomes in practice close to a two-party system. On the other hand, in countries like e.g. Belgium, the Netherlands, or Denmark, MPs are elected by a system known as proportional representation where each party, sometimes subject to a minimum threshold, gets a number of seats proportional to its share of the aggregate popular vote. Under that system, there are normally many parties in parliament and none of them has an absolute majority. Coalition governments then become the norm and small parties have a disproportionately big influence as they sometimes hold the balance of power.
Spain specifically also uses proportional representation, but based on regional, rather than national electoral lists. Since the different regions are not represented in the lower house of parliament in exact proportion to their respective shares of the national population, it may happen that a party which wins far less than 50 % of the national popular vote can still win more than 50 % of the seats in the lower house. That used to be case in Spanish politics where one of the two main parties, i.e the center-right PP and the center-left PSOE, used to win alone either over 50 % of the seats or slightly under 50 %. That balance was shattered in this election because new parties both on the left (Podemos) and on the right (Ciudadanos) took votes respectively from the PSOE and the PP, leaving both with fewer seats. Those new parties grew in support mostly after the 2008 economic crisis due to the frustation of sectors of the Spanish society with the traditional parties. In addition, however, to the new parties, there are also many other smaller parties that already existed before , including the former Communist party (which is now part of the so-called United Left) and various nationalist parties that contest elections in the Spanish regions like Catalonia, the Basque Country, Galicia, etc.
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