Spain’s housing revolt meets parliament’s cold shoulder

Spain has managed, with a certain grim efficiency, to turn a housing emergency into a parliamentary defeat. On Friday, the 350-seat lower house rejected two decrees meant to ease the country’s affordability crisis, just as protesters outside the chamber demanded relief for renters and denounced the people they blame for driving prices ever higher.

The setback is awkward for Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose coalition of the Socialist Party and the far-left Sumar had tried to present the decrees as urgent repairs rather than ideological experiments. One measure would have made evictions of vulnerable tenants harder, curbed speculation, tightened rules on short-term leases and offered tax incentives for renting and building homes. The other would have pushed leases toward automatic renewal and, in practice, made them indefinite unless a landlord paid 12 months of rent to end the contract.

That was enough to alarm Junts, the right-wing Catalan separatist party, which refused to back the plan and argued that it would shrink the rental market rather than fix it. The centre-right Popular Party and far-right Vox also voted no. In other words, the government had a political problem before it had a housing policy problem.

The vote came after protests intensified last month following the eviction of 87-year-old Maria del Carmen Abascal, known across Spain as Maricarmen. Her case became a symbol of the broader anger: she had lived in a rent-capped flat in Madrid’s Retiro district under a contract signed by her father in the 1950s, until the property was bought by the real estate and investment firm Urbagestion in 2018. According to Spanish newspaper El Pais, her rent was raised from 500 euros to 2,650 euros a month, far above her pension of 1,350 euros.

When police carried out the eviction on their fourth attempt, activists were already waiting outside. Since then, Abascal has been offered a preliminary agreement allowing her to return home. Meanwhile, the protest camp in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol has remained in place, a useful reminder that public anger does not disappear just because legislators prefer cleaner abstractions.

Sanchez, for his part, tried to appeal above the usual partisan reflexes, urging lawmakers to think of ordinary people, young adults stuck in their parents’ homes and families living with rising rents. Junts’ Miriam Nogueras replied that the decrees would simply push owners to remove properties from the rental market and drive prices higher still.

However one reads the politics, the numbers are not flattering. Average rent in Spain has almost doubled in the past decade, and the average price per square metre has climbed from 8.20 euros in 2016 to 15.1 euros this year, according to Idealista. That is the sort of inflation that makes every promise of “affordable housing” sound a little theatrical. Spain now has a government under pressure, a market under strain and a parliament that has just shown how little appetite there is for the blunt instruments on offer.

Written by Sandy van Dongen sandy.vandongen@alpineweekly.com