Spain’s Tenants’ Rights Protesters Win Reforms After 87-Year-Old Evicted

Spain’s government has approved new measures to support tenants’ rights following widespread protests – but they need approval from congress and campaigners say they do not go far enough. 

Around 30,000 people marched through Madrid on Saturday, and hundreds remained for days in encampments across the capital’s central plazas, after an 87-year-old woman was forcibly removed from her home of 70 years on a stretcher. 

Maricarmen Abascal was evicted after her rent rose from €500 (£428) to €1,650. Urbagestión – the investment firm that owns the property – has now been forced to allow her to return and pay €533 in rent.  

The eviction prompted the Madrid Tenants’ Union to draw up the Maricarmen decree, which calls for a law against evicting vulnerable individuals without offering them alternative housing. It also proposes curbing unjustified price increases, a freeze on rents and an automatic renewal of leases to prevent unjustified evictions. 

Spain’s Socialist Workers’ party-led coalition government approved the extension of rental contracts, the ban on evicting vulnerable renters and the regulation of seasonal and room rentals that interfere with the supply of affordable housing, although measures must now be approved in congress, where the coalition lacks a majority.

But the government has split its proposal into two decrees – the first is concerned with banning evictions and introducing regulations, while the second considers automatic lease renewals. While it is believed that the conservative Catalan and Basque parties will throw support behind the first decree, it is thought likely the parties will reject the second.

The Tenants’ Union, which also helped organise the protests, said the reforms are inadequate.

Alicia Del Río, a Tenant’s Union spokesperson, said splitting the proposals into separate decrees was “a tactic of tearing something into shreds so that all that’s left are scraps.” 

“The union demands the implementation of the Maricarmen decree in its entirety,” she told the Guardian. “They have to accept what people are demanding.”

Spain’s health minister Mónica García wrote on X: “What a month ago was unimaginable has now been achieved thanks to social mobilisation, the encampment, that clamor from the streets that pushes forward and serves as a lever for change.” 

She added: “Now, the challenge ahead of us is to defend these measures in congress.”