Protests in Spain | Maricarmen's legacy: The housing movement determines the election campaign

The clattering of keys is the protest symbol of the Catalan tenants' union “Sindicat de Llogateres”. Demonstrators use it at rallies against the housing shortage. Photo: Alexandre Bré “La vivienda nos cuesta la vida”, “The apartment is costing us our lives”: Wendy Sosa Ávila says this sentence several times on Saturday lunchtime. She formulates it in a conversation with her neighbor, during an interview with Catalan television and again when she says goodbye to her colleagues from the Sindicat de Llogateres, the Catalan "tenants' union" at the end of the small open-air press conference. The sentence is the motto of Spain's rental movement - and it describes the living situation of Wendy Sosa Ávila.

The Dominican-born Barcelona resident has been living in a rented apartment in the Sants-Montjüic district for 26 years, together with her sister, her mother and her nephew. Wendy and her sister clean apartments for 800 euros a month. Rent costs about the same. Until now. Two years ago, the real estate company Vandor, an offshoot of a British fund, bought the building and it gradually emptied out. Wendy Sosa and her family stayed. “We were told to our faces that we were not the tenants who fit the desired profile,” says the 52-year-old. "We're just not wealthy or glamorous enough for them."

The fund would have to offer some of the apartments to families like Wendy Sosa's. According to a city regulation from 2018, developers are obliged to make 30 percent of new buildings or renovations available as social housing - and the administration would have to check this. According to Sindicat de Llogateres, she did not do that in the Vandor case. The association has therefore filed an administrative lawsuit. “If an administration does not comply with its own regulations, it sends a signal to investment funds that they can do whatever they want,” says Enric Aragonès, spokesman for the Sindicat.

Rents have risen by almost 80 percent since 2014.

Aragonès seems a bit exhausted. This is the third press conference that Sindicat has invited to this week, about different cases. One time it was about real estate bullying by three Spanish companies, another time about the boycott of a housing cooperative by the administration.

And then there is the general strike of November 11th. The idea came about at the protest camps in Madrid and Barcelona after the eviction of pensioner Maricarmen. On September 23, paramedics carried the 87-year-old from her apartment in Madrid's Retiro district, where she had lived for almost 70 years. When a real estate company bought the house in 2018, she could no longer pay the new rent. She fought back for more than six years, supported by the Madrid tenants' union and hundreds of activists. In vain. The images of the elderly woman on the stretcher caused an unprecedented wave of protests - and made Spain's rental movement a determining factor in politics. They convinced Spain's rather cumbersome majority unions UGT and Comisiones Obreras to call for the first general strike since 2012. Nothing was going on in the production facilities of the automotive, heavy and meat industries on Wednesday. In the evening, hundreds of thousands march through Spain's cities; according to authorities, there are 120,000 in Madrid alone, and the police estimate 55,000 in Barcelona. The rental movement speaks of a “historical mobilization.”

“The housing shortage is the central concern of people in this country,” says Aragonès. »Employee rights cannot be separated from this. Wage increases are of no use if they are eaten up by skyrocketing rents.” Rents have risen by almost 80 percent since 2014. Anyone looking for a single-family apartment can expect to pay 1,200 euros. This roughly corresponds to the Spanish minimum wage. That's unacceptable, says Aragonès, adding: "It's costing us our lives."

The general strike becomes the unofficial start of the election campaign. On November 29th, Spain will elect a new parliament in early elections. And that too is proof of the strength of the rental movement. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez brought forward the election date after the left-wing coalition's parliament refused to support two housing decrees. In response to the Spain-wide protests, an emergency decree should suspend forced evictions in social emergencies in 2030, extend expiring rental contracts, and ban funds from purchasing apartments well below market value. The press dubbed the measures “Maricarmen decrees.” In addition to the right-wing conservative opposition, the Catalan Junts party surprisingly also voted against it. Sánchez took the consequences and has been running the election campaign in Maricarmen's name ever since. The day after the general strike, the Diputación Permanente, the rump parliament in force until new elections, confirmed one of the “Maricarmen Decrees.”

The social democratic PSOE is trying to use the crisis as an opportunity - and to set the topics itself. Instead of discussing migration and corruption, the country should discuss the best solutions to the housing shortage. Will the calculation work? That is still open. There is no trend reversal so far in the election surveys. The conservative People's Party and the right-wing extremist Vox together continue to have a clear majority of seats.

Demonstrator with the logo of the tenants' association "Sindicat de Llogateres" on her T-shirt Photo: Alexandre Bré Spain's left-wing coalition had actually made housing policy one of its priorities. In 2019, it extended the minimum term of rental agreements again to five years, and for companies as landlords to seven years. In doing so, she reversed a reform by the previous conservative government, which had shortened the term to three years in 2013. The reform of the rental law came in 2023. Since then, rents have been capped in “tight housing markets”. In Barcelona, ​​the only metropolis where this cap is applied, rents have since fallen by five percent. In April 2026, the government launched a housing plan worth seven billion euros. By 2030, it wants to increase the public inventory through new construction, renovation and the purchase of existing buildings.

But this has not solved the structural causes of the housing crisis. Spain continues to be one of the worst performers in public housing construction. Only 3.3 percent of all apartments are social housing; the EU average is around nine percent. For decades, subsidized apartments were released from social security after a certain period of time and ended up on the open market. The new law now prevents this practice. But it's not that easy to get back what was lost.

If you ask PSOE politicians why the successes of their housing policy are so difficult to grasp, they usually reflexively point to the right. The predominantly conservatively governed autonomous communities did not apply measures such as rent caps. Anything that regulates the market will be boycotted. Anyone who speaks to the activists from the Sindicat de Llogateres will receive a slightly different answer. The Social Democrats of the PSC, the Catalan sister party of the PSOE, are in power in both Barcelona and Catalonia. “Here the administration is boycotting itself,” says Aragonès. If the regional government and the town hall took their own regulations seriously, the public housing park would be much larger, according to the Sindicat spokesman. This applies not only to the systematically ignored 30 percent rule, but generally when dealing with real estate companies and investment funds.

In Spain, international funds bought up entire stocks from banks after the real estate bubble burst. In Barcelona, ​​the Art Nouveau buildings in the upper middle class Eixample and old town apartments in particular have aroused desire. In the Barri Gòtic and the Dreta de l’Eixample, over a quarter of the apartments now belong to companies. In parts of the Eixample, almost every second purchase in 2025 went to a legal entity. Existing requirements are ignored or circumvented, criticizes Sindicat. “Something usually only changes when we build up public pressure and force the administration to act,” says Aragonès.

Txema Escorsa can tell you a thing or two about it. The 34-year-old has lived in the Gràcia district, on Carrer Sant Agustí, since 2015, initially in a shared apartment, then alone. In 2023, the Dutch investment fund New Amsterdam Developers bought the building and transformed one apartment after the other into “co-livings”: furnished luxury shared apartments for digital nomads and high-earning young people from the USA or Central Europe. By renting out individual rooms, the fund tried to circumvent the rent cap: a loophole in the law that was only closed in Catalonia at the beginning of the year. At the time, Txema found advertisements on real estate portals for individual rooms in his building with rents of over 900 euros, more than he paid for his entire apartment. “From one day to the next there were combination locks on the doors,” remembers the science teacher. "And I was also told very clearly: You are not the type of tenant we want here." It's the same sentence that Wendy Sosa heard from Sants. Txema stayed and continued to pay the old rent. Together with the tenants' union, he documented the illegal renovations and forwarded them to the administration. They took notice, imposed fines, but did little else. The Sindicat de Llogateres demanded in vain that she should make use of her right of first refusal. A court ordered the eviction and the tenants' union mobilized. When the eviction was to be carried out in March, hundreds stood on Carrer Sant Agustí. “It was like a folk festival,” says Txema."A few played music, others made bread."

Then there was movement in the case: the city's ombudsman's office has since been mediating between funds and tenants, and one of the ideas on the table is to buy the building through a foundation and turn it into a cooperative. “It showed me that change can only be achieved together,” says Txema Escorsa. Participation in the general strike was a given for him. He spent weeks persuading people on his street to do so. “Many people from the neighborhood took part,” he says. »The older ones in particular are afraid that their children will have to leave the neighborhood or the city. We can’t allow that.” Spain’s tenants’ unions will continue to put pressure on politicians under the new government. No matter what political stripe she will be.

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