Maricarmen Abascal: Spain’s Cruel Housing Reckoning: The Paperwork Outlived Her
Maricarmen Abascal won the right to return to the Madrid home she had fought to keep. Nine days later, she died without signing the lease. The paperwork outlived her.
There is a flat on Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda, in the Retiro district of Madrid, with an old woman’s possessions still in it. She is not coming for them. Maricarmen Abascal died on Wednesday afternoon in the Hospital Gregorio Marañón, a fortnight after police officers and a crew of paramedics carried her out of the home she had lived in since 1956. She was 87. The agreement that was supposed to let her return has died with her, and the keys revert to Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversiones, which may now let the place at whatever the Madrid market will bear. It wanted €2,650 a month from her. It will probably get it from somebody else.
Nine days before she died, that fight had been won. On 28 September, after a four-hour negotiation in the offices of Madrid’s municipal housing company, her lawyer Beatriz Duro and the tenants’ union agreed terms with the owners: a new eight-year lease, rent capped at thirty per cent of her net income, which came to roughly €435, a little below the €500 she had been paying before the building changed hands. Her cousin Vicente carried the news to her hospital bed. Duro told reporters she was delighted. The contract was never signed. Documents were outstanding, and her return depended on a discharge that never came.
So the state and the market between them took eight years to arrive at a number an 87-year-old pensioner could pay, and arrived nine days late.
“THEY KILLED HER,” SAYS THE UNION. NO ONE WILL BE CHARGED.
The Sindicato de Inquilinas was blunt within hours. Its spokeswoman, Alicia del Río, said speculation and rentierism had “finished killing” their colleague. The union’s social action secretary, Álvaro Ferreira, went further and called it murder, the consequence of institutional mistreatment. Andrea Zayas of the Sindicato Comisiones de Base named three defendants: the vulture funds, the rentiers, and a government that did nothing in eight years. By evening, the Puerta del Sol camp had held a minute’s silence and marched on the Congress, chanting that these are not deaths but killings.
Let us be careful here, because the truth is colder than the accusation and does more damage. There will be no charge. There is no coroner’s finding that an eviction killed her, and an 87-year-old woman with a recognised fifty per cent disability may die in October for reasons that have nothing to do with September. Her own lawyer put the honest version on Cadena SER: the deterioration in her health over the past year of proceedings was plain to see, and had the eviction been suspended as they asked, we would not be here. That is a clinical judgement offered by someone who watched it happen, not a verdict. It should be read as what it is.
What requires no verdict at all is the mechanism. Nothing unlawful occurred on 23 September. The door was opened with an angle grinder, the woman was taken out on a stretcher, and every step of it conformed to Spanish law. The instrument was the leases act of 1994, passed by Felipe González’s Socialist government, which set a clock running on Spain’s old protected tenancies and permits a second inheritance of one only where the tenant’s recognised disability reaches sixty-five per cent. Hers was assessed at fifty. Fifteen percentage points, and a home of seventy years.
A dictatorship’s view of who counts as a householder burned half of Maricarmen’s legal inheritance before she was old enough to know it existed, and a Socialist statute of 1994 collected on the balance.
There is a further detail that deserves a moment, because it tells you how long the dead hand reaches. Her father signed the original tenancy in 1956 and died four years later. Under Franco’s rules, only men could hold such contracts, so the tenancy transferred first to her mother, who died in 2005. That transfer consumed one of the two inheritances the law allows.
THE COMPANY PICKED UP THE PHONE. THE MINISTRY COULD NOT.
The right has an argument worth stating properly, and it is not the one about rental supply. It is this: in the end it was Urbagestión that moved. Her lawyer said so herself, and said it bitterly, complaining that the administrations had no alternative to offer and that it fell to the firm which evicted her to produce one. The company’s directors sent condolences to the family on Wednesday, expressing profound sadness.
Set against that is the record of the preceding months, as Duro described it to Cuatro. The ministry tried to make up the difference in rent from housing plan funds, which the law permits. The company never took that forward. At a certain point it stopped answering the telephone. A well-known writer offered to cover the shortfall. Nothing. Four eviction attempts were made in a single year. The firm negotiated only after the images of a stretcher went round the country and tents appeared in the Puerta del Sol, which is a statement about public pressure rather than corporate conscience.
And the sharpest indictment of this government was delivered by the woman herself. In an interview recorded by TVE in the hours before she was carried out, Maricarmen was asked about Pedro Sánchez. He has no idea how many evictions happen every day, she said, or he does not want to have one. On Wednesday the prime minister posted that the country felt her loss as its own.
A DECREE NAMED AFTER A DEAD WOMAN
The sequence of the last nine days is a documentary record of political reflex. Congress threw out the government’s emergency housing decrees on 2 October. Sánchez called an election for 29 November on the Monday. On Tuesday, the Council of Ministers simply approved the decrees again, with modifications, to be sent to the standing committee that functions once parliament is dissolved and where the Basque Nationalists’ support makes at least one of them likely to pass. The text was in the official gazette on Wednesday morning. The first decree took effect on Thursday, suspending the eviction of vulnerable tenants until 2030 and guaranteeing automatic renewal for leases expiring up to 2029. The Spanish press had already given it a name. They call it the Maricarmen decree.
She was alive when it was approved and dead when it came into force.
CCOO, UGT and the tenants’ unions have now called a twenty-four hour general strike for 11 November, the first in Spain since 2012, the first of Sánchez’s premiership, and eighteen days before the country votes. Pepe Álvarez of the UGT has told employers it is absolutely constitutional. He is right, and it will change nothing on its own, because the polls still put the Popular Party and Vox comfortably past a majority, and the Popular Party’s regional governments signed a joint document in 2024 refusing to apply the rent controls already on the statute book.
Here is what should happen, and it is not complicated enough to require another commission. The sixty-five per cent threshold in the 1994 act should be deleted and the remaining protected tenancies secured for the lifetime of the tenant. That is one clause. It could have been tabled in any of the eight years Sánchez has governed, and it was not, and an emergency decree rushed through a standing committee eighteen days before an election is not the same thing as a law. Decrees expire. Statutes have to be repealed in daylight, by people who must then explain themselves to voters.
Infobae reports that Maricarmen said, in the days before she died, that she had not managed to defend her own home but had fought so that others would fight for theirs. She did that much. The rest is owed, not earned.
Somewhere in Retiro tonight there is a flat with a dead woman’s belongings in it and a price on it that nobody who ever lived there could pay. That is Spain’s housing crisis. Everything else is a campaign.
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