Not One More Maricarmen: Spain’s Housing Crisis Shows the Contradictions of Sánchez’s Progressive Government

This weekend, streets across the Spanish State flooded with protesters demanding justice for Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman who was violently evicted from her home at the hands of federal police. In videos, the police are shown breaking down Maricarmen’s door and carrying her out of her home in a stretcher.

Maricarmen’s story is only the tip of the iceberg of the housing crisis in the Spanish State, which carried out a total of 25,540 evictions last year. Still, housing prices continue to rise: between the second quarter of 2025 and the second quarter of 2026, they increased by 12.2 percent. These figures have grave consequences, from families being evicted from public housing to the case of a woman named Olga who took her own life after being evicted. These are crimes of the state.

Hundreds of thousands have filled the streets in the last days, demanding justice for Maricarmen and all the victims of the unjust housing system. “It’s high time for a renters’ strike,” protesters sang, “it’s high time for a general strike.” On Saturday, protesters set up encampments in Madrid’s historic Puerta del Sol plaza, where they plan to remain until at least Tuesday, demanding a comprehensive housing reform ahead of the government’s weekly cabinet meeting.

Sánchez, a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), is often hailed as an “icon” of Europe’s Left, and he has called Maricarmen’s eviction “a social tragedy that we cannot accept.” But the contradiction between his so-called “progressivism” and the violent actions of the Spanish State are stark. 

Sánchez, after all, has presided over the government as the housing crisis has grown more acute, prioritizing the profits of real-estate companies and private investors at the expense of the Spanish masses, like Maricarmen. As our comrades from the Revolutionary Workers’ Current (CRT) in the Spanish State point out, “it was a police unit under the command of the central government that carried out the eviction and attacked protesters.”

These monstrous evictions cannot be separated from other struggles facing the country’s working class, like overcrowded and poorly-maintained schools and universities, insufficient wages, and the European Union’s highest youth unemployment rate. Protests calling for an education strike converged with housing protests this weekend at the center of Madrid, the country’s capital.

Sanchez’s “progressivism” also flies in the face of the Spanish State’s violence against immigrants. In August, when more than 50,000 young Moroccans swam to Spain’s colonial enclave of Ceuta seeking a better life, Sánchez deployed the army. More than one hundred of these immigrants died in the crossing, and the army and the Far Right has continued to attack and brutalize the immigrants that remain.

Despite his betrayals of the Spanish and international working class, Sánchez was welcomed with open arms by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — the very same day that Maricarmen was being evicted, and the same week that Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump visited the city. Sánchez, along with other global “progressive” leaders, had breakfast at Mamdani’s home in Gracie Mansion, and was applauded for increasing the Spanish State’s minimum wage.

Referencing Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, Mamdani praised his guests, saying that “those of us in this room hold the power to make [the] vision [of a better world] a reality. We can carry our movement for equality and justice to further horizons than we ever thought possible.”

How could it be that those “global left leaders” who are carrying “justice to further horizons than we ever thought possible” are evicting old women, charging housing rights protesters, and arresting pro-Palestine protesters denouncing Netanyahu’s visit to New York City? On these grounds, Sánchez and Mamdani are birds of a feather, and understand well that their task as executives of the capitalist state involves deploying their police force to arrest and brutalize working class people who are fighting for dignity, safe living conditions, and an end to genocide.

Ceuta and Maricarmen embody a fundamental contradiction at the heart of progressive and neoreformist global phenomena. Figures like Sánchez and Mamdani hide behind left rhetoric and the facades of the social movements that brought them to power. But as politicians that do not strengthen the working class’s ability to organize and fight, nor challenge the fundamental logic of the capitalist system, they have little choice but to administer the atrocities of that system — whether evictions, prioritizing corporate profits, or brutalizing immigrants.

As Mamdani and Sánchez ate quiche in the heart of global finance and imperialism, tens of thousands of workers and renters in Madrid chanted, “long live the struggle of the workers” and “where is the progressive government?” Workers and students mobilizing in the Spanish state are showing the way forward to reject attacks on our basic human needs. They are drawing conclusions in real time and connecting the struggle against the housing crisis to attacks on public education. As Marx wrote in 1845, “we are an indignation to this depravity.” Only through mobilization can we unleash the power to challenge austerity, attacks on our class, and the Right — not by negotiating from above.