The Woman on the Stretcher Who Brought Down a Government
Spain’s snap election was triggered by a housing revolt that turned an 87-year-old tenant into a national symbol and exposed eight years of political failure.
Spain goes to the polls on 29 November. The prime minister announced it on Monday, after Congress rejected emergency measures meant to quell public fury over housing. The announcement came less than seventy-two hours after that defeat, delivered from the Moncloa Palace with a promise to defend housing against speculators and liberties against reactionaries. It is a good line. It is also, measured against his time in office, a late one.
There is a longer charge sheet against this government, and the right has been reading it aloud for a year. Sánchez’s former transport minister was sentenced to twenty-four years by the Supreme Court in June. Separate cases touch his wife and his brother. The courts will deal with all of it, as they should. None of it explains why an 87-year-old woman was carried out of her home on a stretcher.
Because the election was not really called by Pedro Sánchez. It was called by María del Carmen Abascal.
How Maricarmen’s Eviction Ignited Spain’s Housing Crisis
On 23 September, police carried her out of her flat in Madrid’s Retiro district. She was 87, she had lived there for 71 years, and it was the fourth attempt at eviction that year. She had arrived as a girl. Her mother had died in that flat, and she had expected to die there too. She was taken to the Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she remains, being treated for exhaustion. From her bed she recorded a message asking that what happened to her should not happen to anyone else, and that the unjust laws which allowed it should be changed.
She will be going home. Her lawyer, Beatriz Duro, announced an agreement with the owners days later. Reached after four hours of negotiation and mediated by Madrid’s public housing company, it gives her an eight-year contract at roughly thirty per cent of her pension, about the 500 euros she was paying before. That was the rent until the investment firm that bought the building sought 2,650 euros a month instead. The company disputes the account and says it later offered a lower figure. Note the defence, then note what it concedes. The going rate for staying in her own home exceeded everything she had to live on.
Nothing illegal happened that morning. The eviction was carried out in exact conformity with Spanish law. That is the whole indictment.
No bailiff exceeded his powers. No landlord broke a rule. The instrument was a leases act passed in 1994 by the Socialist government of Felipe González, which set a clock running on Spain’s old protected tenancies. A clause lets such a tenancy pass down a second time where the tenant has a recognised disability of sixty-five per cent. Maricarmen’s was assessed at fifty. By that margin she lost her home. In eight years as prime minister, Sanchez has brought forward no proposal to change it.
FIFTY CITIES, AND A CAMP THAT IS STILL THERE
Spain rose anyway. Protesters have been camped in the Puerta del Sol since the eviction, and the tents were still standing on Monday morning as the prime minister spoke. Last weekend brought marches in fifty towns and cities. The government’s own delegation counted 70,000 in Madrid. The tenants’ union claimed 500,000.
Whichever figure you take, the placards were not asking for tinkering. The Sindicato de Inquilinas wants rents halved and homes held by investment funds taken off them, and its spokeswoman Valeria Racu says a general strike over housing is coming. Her Madrid colleague Alicia del Río called the government’s emergency package a minimum measure, which is the kindest thing said about it from that side.
She was right. The two decrees would have frozen evictions of vulnerable tenants, tightened the rules on short lets and made leases renew automatically. Useful, modest, overdue. On 2 October the Congress of Deputies threw them out, the first by 172 votes to 178, the second by 166 to 184. The Popular Party and Vox voted against, and so did Carles Puigdemont’s Junts, arguing that protecting tenants would shrink the rental supply and push prices higher.
That argument deserves a hearing, because it is the argument, repeated in every capital where rent has become political. Cap the return and the landlord withdraws the flat. What it lacks is any reckoning with where Spain actually stands. The Bank of Spain counts a shortfall of 750,000 homes between 2021 and 2025, with household formation running at 240,000 a year against 92,000 homes built. Social housing is roughly 3.3 per cent of the stock. The share of young Spaniards owning a home has fallen from 41 per cent in 2007 to 22 per cent. A market that produced those numbers unregulated will not be rescued by further restraint from the state.
A LAW THE RIGHT SIMPLY REFUSES TO OBEY
And the restraint has been remarkable. The 2023 Housing Act let regions cap prices in stressed rental zones. Five have done so. The Popular Party’s regional governments signed a joint document in 2024 refusing to apply the law at all. Madrid, where rents are highest, has declared not one zone. Andalusia took the law to the Constitutional Court. Bills tabled by the PP in this parliament would delete the mechanism from the statute book entirely. This is the party favoured to govern.
Within hours of calling the election, the government confirmed the sequel. Having lost in a full chamber, it will re-approve the decrees and send them to the standing committee that sits once parliament is dissolved, where the arithmetic is kinder and Junts is not needed. Perfectly constitutional. Also an obvious question. If that route existed on Tuesday, where was it in March?
WINNING THE ARGUMENT, LOSING THE COUNTRY
A survey by 40dB for El País and Cadena SER found 67.5 per cent of Spaniards back limits on rents, including 56.5 per cent of Popular Party voters and 55.2 per cent of Vox voters. Researchers at the Universidad Carlos III found that half of Vox’s own supporters blame investment funds for the crisis. Yet every published projection but the state pollster’s now puts the Popular Party and Vox together between 201 and 213 seats, well past the 176 they need. Asked what should be tackled first, those same voters name immigration.
That is not a failure of public opinion. It is a failure of delivery. People will go on believing that speculation is the problem and still vote for the party of speculation, if the party that agrees with them spends eight years saying so and leaves the statute book exactly where it found it. Conviction without consequence is just commentary, and voters can smell it.
Maricarmen will get her flat back, rescued by public fury from a machine that will process thousands more this year with no camera present. The machine was built in parliament. It can be dismantled there.
Spain did not lose its homes to the market. It legislated them away, politely, in daylight, and called it reform.
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