Thousands of protestors have set up encampments in city squares across Spain. The immediate spark has been the housing crisis but years of neo-liberal driven austerity have brought matters to a head

Steven Marsh is a Professor of Film and Spanish Peninsular Cultural Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago

Cross-posted from Counterfire

Housing demonstration in Madrid. Photo: Barcex / CC BY-SA 4.0

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez was forced to call a snap general election for November 29 th after a right-wing alliance between the neofascist Vox party, the Catalan conservative nationalists and the official opposition, the Partido Popular (PP), blocked his government’s emergency (and tepid) efforts to reform housing laws, temporarily restrict speculation and protect the rights of tenants. The Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos (Union of Tenants) has responded by announcing a general strike for November 11 th .

Sánchez and his allies took action under intense pressure from the street protests which followed the eviction of eighty-seven-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from the flat she had lived in for seventy years. The apartment building had been sold to a private equity fund that dramatically increased her rent. The judiciary backed the new owners and the police set about violently removing the elderly woman from her home when she was unable to pay the new exorbitant rent. Popular outrage was and continues to be palpable. The fury only increased when days later Maricarmen died in hospital days later, a martyr to the murderous hand of capital.

A huge march through the centre of Madrid demanding immediate reforms to resolve the housing crisis on September 26 th culminated with a camp in the city’s main square, la Puerta del Sol, an action reminiscent of the May 15 th movement in 2011 (the 15M). Since then, the camp has expanded and similar occupations have spread throughout the Spanish state, to Malaga, Granada, Valencia and Barcelona, among other cities.

The indignation about the eviction of Maricarmen was sparked days after the corrupt president of the Madrid regional government Isabel Díaz Ayuso was exposed as having used public funds to purchase a luxury penthouse, ostensibly as an ‘office’. Ayuso’s lavish attic – now, following the scandal, back on the market – stands across the street from her mother’s apartment building.

In Cataluña, the openly xenophobic pro-independence party Aliança Catalana threatens to take parliamentary seats from the traditional nationalist group Junts per Cataluyna. Junts is a party entirely in hock to the Catalan bourgeoisie – the landlords and the speculators – that sustains it financially. It joined Vox (who want Junts proscribed) and the PP – the very party that when in government initiated the process that led to the jailing of several of its leaders in 2017 and forced Catalan President Carles Puigdemont into exile – to vote down the two proposed reforms. The two decrees proposed by Sánchez’s government which, while far from that demanded by the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos, was too much for Junts. Meanwhile, after more than thirty years of PP rule, the Madrid public housing stock has been drastically depleted and sold off cheaply to transnational hedge-fund companies. The very same companies responsible for Maricarmen’s eviction.

Sánchez’s opportinism

The election announcement comes after weeks of extreme right-wing racist pressure following the events in the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta, when tens of thousands of people poured over the border from Morocco and the Right sent its ghoulish representatives to fan the flames of racism and raise the spectre of loss of Spain’s sovereignty over the city. For a time, xenophobia pervaded the headlines of the conservative press who talked of an ‘invasion’ and the loss of ‘national integrity’. The government itself split over how to deal with Morocco with the ministers of the Interior and Defence each contradicting the other. While immigration will certainly be one of the Right’s key issues during the election campaign, the popular reaction to the housing question, inequality, and the PP’s implication in speculation has thrown them off course: hence Sánchez’s opportunistic move.

A new political cycle

The 15M was a deliriously utopian affair, whose very anarchic condition—at times wilfully apolitical (a repudiation of both the Left and the Right as outdated formulas)—imprecision and confusion, meant that, while exhilarating, it proved a short-lived experience. The current encampment is notably marked by a critique of capitalism. While the Left and the media have pointedly ignored the word for decades, housing is demonstrably a class issue. It is only the poor who are being evicted. And only the rich sending the bailiffs to carry out the evictions. The fact they do so with the aid and violence of the police, only serves to clarify the role of the State in the class struggle. Having failed to address the issue throughout its time in office, the coalition government, which prides itself as being the ‘most progressive administration’ of the democratic period, has been exposed.

The demands of the occupiers, led by the Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos and, under the influence of a relatively new formation of young socialists that originated in the Basque Country, the Coordinadora Juvenil Socialista, include calling for a general strike.

State-subsidised trade unions CCOO and the UGT responded to the movement on the streets by reluctantly backing the call for a 24-hour general strike. But the General Secretary of UGT later insisted that such a strike would not be held until after the November 29 th election. It remains to be seen how they will respond to the call for the November 11 strike. But one of the lessons of the 15M is that the traditional union bureaucracy is fragile and susceptible to the militancy of its membership. In any case, the coherence of the protest’s demands – unlike that of the 15M – suggests that this is potentially the start of something bigger.

A new generation awakes

Veteran revolutionary socialist Jaime Pastor has written of what the Tenants Union has dubbed ‘a new cycle of political change from below’ [‘un nuevo ciclo político que viene de abajo’] in the context of the new occupation of the city squares. He rightly points out that the 15M was a direct consequence of the 2007/8 economic crisis and part of the global wave of uprisings that began in Tunisia in 2011. The recent events in Madrid are focused on specific issues, and they mark a departure from the left-wing populism that emerged from the 15M and ended up in the current government. A new generation is, according to Pastor, assuming political consciousness in the face of ruthless capitalism and its right-wing authoritarian sponsors. Signs of this are there in the Madrid encampment with the demands for affordable housing and measures against speculation extending to solidarity with Palestine, the antifascist struggle, feminism and climate change.

Nuria Alabao draws attention to the fact that unlike the 15M, whose critique was a general repudiation of the forces and institutions that had brought the veneer (if not the reality) of democracy to Spain under a broad, amorphous direction based on the collective assembly, the current mobilisation has specific demands, a well-defined programme and a clear leadership. If the 15M was characterised by the ‘transversal’ (to employ a term fashionable at the time), the current wave of protest has emerged from class struggle.

The astute liberal commentator Enric Juliana in his regular column in the Barcelona daily newspaper La Vanguardia offered an interesting history of what he calls the ‘mutinies’ [‘motines’] that have characterised popular uprisings in Madrid since the seventeenth century; hunger, prohibitions on specific clothing, tax increases, lies of government officials and others. What Juliana – true to form – fails to mention is that these street rebellions have always, without exception, been distinguished by the poor protesting the rich; that is, by class struggle. The current situation is no different.

Finally, this new movement is unlikely to be dissuaded by the gestures of a ‘progressive’ government that throughout its nearly eight years in power has failed to deliver on its promises. Not only has it done nothing about housing but also the celebrated repressive ‘ley de mordaza’ (Gag Law), introduced by the PP in the aftermath of the 15M to restrict the right to protest and media coverage of police action (and brought with it draconian on-the-spot fines imposed by the police) and which the PSOE and its governing partners promised to repeal, remains in place. While the need to combat the rise of fascism, which is a very real threat throughout Spain including Cataluña, and the necro-politics of the vicious State, the possibilities of real change are beginning to take shape in the country’s central squares.