The eruption of a mass housing movement in the past 10 days has put social class back on the agenda of Spanish politics and completely altered the dimensions of a high stakes General Election on 29 November.

Ben Wray is a freelance journalist and researcher from Scotland, who lives in the Basque Country. Ben is co-author of Scotland After Britain (Verso Books, 2022). He produces the Gig Economy Project Substack .

Picture by Zarateman

Spain will return to the ballot box on 29 November. The decision by prime minister Pedro Sánchez to go to the people again has everything to do with the social movement that has risen up in Spain over the last 10 days against evictions and for the right to housing.

The spark began with the eviction of Maricarmen, an 87 year old tenant, from her Madrid apartment that she has lived in for 71 years. Police battered activists attempting to stop the eviction, and Maricarmen was taken out on a stretcher. A vulture fund that had bought the property wanted to raise the rent by over 300%. Responding to the eviction, thousands of activists, including those of the renters’ union, occupied Madrid’s ‘Sol’ square and set-up tents: the torch-paper had been lit.

The Spanish Government responded quickly to the pressure from the movement by bringing forward two housing decrees. The first one would stop all evictions until 2030 among other measures, the second one responded to the specific demands of renters’ union for unconditional contracts for renters, with landlords having to pay a compensation penalty equivalent to 12 months rent if they broke the contract and evicted the tenant. The Government doesn’t have a majority and relies on the support of a posse of left-wing parties as well as some centre-right ones to pass anything into law.

Sánchez organised the decrees into two fully expecting that the second one would be defeated by his right-wing ‘allies’, the Catalan pro-independence Junts per Catalunya and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), but that the first one would pass and the evictions would be stopped. In the end, Junts refused to vote for either decree. Rumours are that Carles Puidgemont’s party was under pressure from Catalan banks and property lobbies. The defeat of the decrees led to an uproar, tens of thousands protested in Madrid the next day and many thousands more across Spain, with occupations of city squares taking place across the country.

Why was the government’s defeat a launch pad for calling a general election? Because Sánchez had to call elections by May 2027 at the latest anyway, and the question of housing is much more favourable terrain for the left than any other issue that could conceivably dominate an election campaign. Before Maricarmen’s eviction, Spanish politics had become fixated on the migration crisis in Ceuta, after thousands of people entered the African enclave from Morocco at the end of July. If the Ceuta crisis defined the election campaign, Sánchez had no chance: the immigration debate is dominated by the far-right Vox, which pulls the centre-right PP behind it.

Housing is different entirely. Rather than natives versus migrants, or christians versus muslims, housing is dominated by the division between tenant and landlord, between the young person that can’t afford to move out of their parents home and the vulture fund that wants to evict tenants to make way for tourists. The housing crisis is defined by social class: on the one side those who own multiple properties and can use their asset wealth to extract rents, and on the other side those who don’t own property and have to pay for increasingly unaffordable rents or mortgages. On this terrain, the left’s attempt to stop evictions is a message that can appeal well beyond its base support: a large majority of voters from all parties, including PP and Vox, support the call of the renters’ union for a general strike against evictions.

Sánchez’s PSOE has historically stood on the side of the rentier over the renter. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, and nearly a million people lost their home in the country, it was PSOE that was in government and bailed out the banks while protecting the right of the bailiffs to evict people from their homes. The PAH anti-evictions movement which emerged in the wake of the financial crisis was explicitly opposed to PSOE’s handling of the crisis under Zapatero’s leadership, until PP took power in late 2011. In the years that followed, the number of renters in Spain has grown as the working class has been increasingly priced out of buying a house. But even when Sánchez took PSOE back into power in 2018, addressing the housing crisis remained very far from his priorities.

Indeed, the one attack line of PP and Vox over the past week which does have some purchase is: why did it take the Spanish Government eight years and Maricarmen’s eviction for it to finally do something serious about the housing crisis? The cost of house prices and rents has skyrocketed under Sánchez’ time in power, while wages have continued to stagnate. The intensification of the housing crisis under the left coalition government since 2020 speaks to the weak form of social democracy that has been deployed: while the government has talked the language of social justice and implemented some reforms in that direction, the Spanish economy has continued to be a motor for asset price inflation, touristification and low-waged service work.

Nonetheless, Sánchez has survived in power this long because he is an agile political figure, capable of sensing the pulse of the masses. By responding quickly to the demands of the housing movement, he has positioned PSOE and his coalition government as the defenders of tenants, while PP and Vox stood emphatically opposed to the housing decrees, and thus appear as the spokespeople of the propertied classes. The PP’s only answer to the housing crisis is to build more houses, a position that has been defended by Jeff Bezos among others. But anyone with a memory of Spain’s pre-2008 housing boom will know that this is no solution: from 1998 to 2008, six million houses were built, and the price of housing doubled. It is the acceleration of mortgage credit creation which dictates movements in housing prices, not supply and demand. Or to put it another way, no one believes more vulture-fund owned houses will solve the housing crisis.

Still, the polls would suggest that PP and Vox will form a coalition government after 29 November. The main problem that Sánchez has is that the parties to his left which he needs to form a majority with have lost force since the last General Election in 2023, when PP and Vox were very narrowly short of a majority. The ‘Sumar’ coalition which emerged around Yolanda Díaz in 2023, taking the reins of the alternative left away from Podemos, appeared fresh three years ago: now it looks anything but. Divided between the remains of Sumar and the remains of Podemos, it is not clear that the left is capable of uniting, and even if can cobble something together, whether this can be anything more than the unity of the graveyard.

It was a mass social movement in the form of ‘the Indignados’, or ’15-M’, which gave new life to the Spanish alternative left. Podemos emerged from that movement as a fresh-faced, dynamic anti-establishment force. But it was never able to displace PSOE as the main player on the left of Spanish politics. In the end, the left has ended up propping up PSOE in power, while PSOE has increasingly taken on much of the language of the left. In Sánchez’ speech announcing the election, he talked about how he needed voters to give him a majority so he could “bring the elites to heel”. As Spain has polarised into left and right-wing blocs, Sánchez has come to be the dominant figure of the former.

But the electoral maths doesn’t lie. Sánchez won’t win alone. He will need the alternative left to at least get up to around 10% of the vote to give him a fighting chance of forming a government again. That didn’t seem plausible before the housing movement erupted, and it still seems unlikely, but if they can bottle some of the anti-establishment rage of the housing movement then, who knows? Housing activists should be rightly wary of their movement being circumvented into electoral ends, but they may also smell an opportunity: if the left does win a surprising victory on 29 November, everyone will know that they have the housing movement to thank, and the political impetus that will give the movement could be immense.

On the other hand, if the right win and we have a far-right party in government for the first time in Spain in the post-Franco era, we can expect a sharp turn towards authoritarianism. What will be in Vox’s mind in particular will be to move towards its ambitions of a centralised Spanish state, where the power bases of the independence forces in Catalunya and the Basque Country are cut down to size. The aim will be to take power away from the autonomous communities so that Spain never again experiences the the sort of independence drive that we saw in Catalunya almost 10 years ago. All attempts in the Sánchez years to forge a ‘plurinational’ Spain will be rolled back.

The old divisions that define Spain – of class and of nation – have been somewhat submerged in the years of ‘progressive government’, but they never really went away. The social class dimension has come roaring back with the housing movement. If PP-Vox win the election, the national divisions will also return to the front and centre.

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