Javier Moreno Zacarés in Sidecar:
Fifteen years after the indignados occupied the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s central plaza is once again the locus of a mass movement that has brought Spain to a political impasse. How are we back here again? The immediate trigger was the eviction of an elderly tenant. Maricarmen Abascal, who had occupied her rent-capped apartment in central Madrid since 1956, was expelled from her home on 23 September after the investment fund Urbagestión acquired the property and exploited a legal loophole to quintuple her rent. Maricarmen’s age and vulnerability – the 87-year-old was removed on a hospital bed and has since died – made it a particularly egregious breach of the moral economy. The case struck a nerve, prompting a political storm; the government has now announced a snap election. As protests spread nationwide, the encampment at Puerta del Sol consolidated under the leadership of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, Madrid’s tenant union. Media outlets are reporting on the motions passed at the open-air general assembly. One decision has been of particular public interest: a general strike for the right to housing, announced for 11 November, a few weeks before the election.
The political elite faces a reckoning. At the outset of the current parliamentary term in 2023, the progressive coalition headed by Sánchez’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) placed housing at the top of the agenda. The promises were ambitious: the provision of mass social housing, the imposition of rent controls, the reassertion of the public interest against rentier logics. Yet these commitments yielded little. This was partly due to the obstruction of the right, both in parliament and in the regional governments under its control. But a share of the blame lies in the ambivalence of the Socialist Party itself, whose ministers have repeatedly expressed discomfort with what they regard as excessive regulation of housing.
More here.
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