Protests break out in Spain after rejection of housing bill: will this provoke an early vote? | Housing news

Tens of thousands of people have gathered across Spain as protests have spread since the conservative-dominated parliament rejected a bill proposing measures to tackle the housing crisis.

Parliament on Friday rejected two decrees proposed by Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez’s left-wing minority coalition government intended to resolve the housing crisis.

The protests erupted late last month after an 87-year-old woman was evicted from her home where she had lived for 70 years in the capital, Madrid. Maria del Carmen Abascal’s eviction took place after an international investment fund bought her building and raised the rent.

Local media suggested Sanchez could call a snap election as early as November after seeing the strength of Saturday’s protests across the country. The current Spanish legislature is expected to end next summer.

Will the housing crisis trigger early elections? Here’s what we know:

What happened in Parliament on Friday?

Emergency measures proposed by Spain’s left-wing government to combat the country’s housing affordability crisis were not adopted on Friday.

The government had proposed two measures to protect the country’s tenants. The first decree aimed to stop evictions of vulnerable people, make real estate speculation more difficult, impose stricter restrictions on short-term leases and provide tax incentives to encourage rental and construction of housing.

The second decree proposed making leases automatically renew when they expire, essentially making them indeterminate. A landlord would have to pay his tenant 12 months’ rent to break the contract.

Sánchez, who leads a coalition government made up of his socialist party and the far-left Sumar party, called on lawmakers ahead of the vote to put aside political calculations and pressure.

“Think of ordinary people, those who most need the protection of public institutions. Think of the millions of young people who cannot afford to leave their parents’ homes. Think of the families who live with the constant anxiety of ever-rising rents,” he said before the vote.

But the measures proposed by his government were rejected by the majority of the 350 seats in the lower house of Parliament.

The Catalan separatist right-wing Junts party has refused to support the housing decrees, saying they would end up tightening the housing market. The center-right People’s Party and the far-right Vox also voted against the measures.

Miriam Nogueras de Junts argued that the decrees would only lead to landlords removing their properties from the rental market and thus driving up prices even further.

“If they really wanted to protect people, put a stop to vulture funds and reactivate housing, they would have done it already. They had eight years,” she added on X, referring to Sanchez’s government.

Health Minister Monica Garcia said on

“Today, the right has given rent-seeking a parliamentary majority that it does not have in the streets, but it will pay the price as soon as possible,” she added.

Before the parliamentary vote, Marta Soler Gallart, director of the Department of Sociology at the University of Barcelona, ​​explained that neither decree addressed the housing problem in the medium or long term.

“Models such as Vienna, with its low rents, are cited in support of these decrees, but we forget that the Vienna model and others have low rents due to their long history of creating and maintaining public social housing,” Soler Gallart told Al Jazeera on September 30.

“In Spain, however, public funds are invested in social housing which, after a certain time, is resold at market price.”

Soler Gallart also said the new measures disadvantage landlords with small or few properties by extending five-year rental contracts by two years and providing for an indefinite extension of their leases.

“However, these extensions are not obligatory if the owner can demonstrate that they need the property for their own use,” she said.

Why are people protesting all over Spain?

Protests erupted across Spain in late September after Abascal, 87, was evicted from her home. The investment fund that bought his building raised his rent by more than 200 percent, to about $1,880 a month, a move aimed at ousting the long-term tenant to make way for lucrative tourist apartments.

In recent years, Spain has seen protests against mass tourism, linked to the housing crisis and the soaring cost of living. Spain is the second most visited country in the world, attracting 97 million tourists last year.

Even though Abascal has returned home, according to her representatives, she has become the face of the country’s housing crisis, and citizens across Spain are demanding that the government tackle the problem.

Angered by Parliament’s rejection of government measures, tens of thousands of people took to the streets.

“It’s a shame,” Nando de Anguulo, 26, who took part in Saturday’s protest in Madrid, told the Reuters news agency.

“This only proves that it is we, the people, who must adapt to political parties and not politicians to what the people want, and it cannot continue like this.”

While the protests were mostly peaceful, in Valencia, in the southeast of the country, police fired rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse demonstrations. Around thirty demonstrators managed to enter the City of Arts and Sciences, an emblematic cultural building, before the police pushed them away.

Meanwhile, in Madrid, Spanish police arrested three members of a far-right group and fired rubber bullets on Saturday evening.

Far-right activists, some of whom performed Nazi salutes, attempted to reach protesters camped in Puerta del Sol, a central square in the Spanish capital, the Spanish government said.

Valeria Racu, a spokeswoman for the Tenants Union, said Saturday’s rallies revealed “a new energy that we haven’t seen in a long time and an energy that shows that eight days of people power can result in more than eight years of progressive government.”

“Now the real politics begins – a politics that has always belonged to the people and which will return once and for all to the streets,” Racu added.

Could the housing crisis lead to early elections?

Housing is a sensitive issue in Spain because it impacts how people vote. The average rent in the country has almost doubled over the past 10 years. The average price per square meter rose from 8.20 euros (around $9.08 at the time) in 2016 to 15.1 euros ($17.15) this year, according to real estate site Idealista.

In an October 1 article for Vanity Fair, Spanish journalist Jorge Dioni Lopez pointed out that after eight years in power, it is housing that is causing Sanchez to lose the support of educated young people, middle-class children.

“The government faces a difficult situation. Firstly, because most of the relevant powers belong to other levels of government. Secondly, because Spain is a nation of owners. Unlike other European countries, almost all public housing that has been built has ended up in private hands and, historically, homeownership has been more attractive than renting,” he wrote.

“Housing is our savings system and also the main means of transmitting wealth between generations,” he added.

After the Spanish Parliament rejected the government’s housing reform plans on Friday, center-right Popular Party (PP) leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo urged Sanchez to “call elections as soon as possible”, saying he had support “neither from the streets nor from Parliament”.

Although Sanchez has not officially announced new elections, Spanish online news site El Diario reported that elections could take place as early as November 29. The Spanish general elections are currently scheduled for July 2027.