Red Flags in Puerta del Sol: Can Spain's Left Ride the Housing Wave?

The eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old Madrid disabled woman, in late September unleashed a return of mass disobedience in Spain and has at least partially altered the political landscape. A mass demonstration called by the Tenants’ Union ended in a month-long occupation of Puerta del Sol and other Spanish squares. The Spanish government presented two housing reforms in the Spanish parliament (which was blocked by the Spanish and Catalan rights - shamefully in the latter case as its leaders are gaining full amnesty after calling the outlawed independence referendum in 2017 in exchange for giving parliamentary support for left-coalition policies). A general strike was called by all the workers and tenants’ unions. And general elections were brought forward by premier Pedro Sánchez, who is hoping the election campaign will now focus on housing and other social matters.

Maricarmen was a textbook victim of the predatory housing speculation, often involving big investment banks, that has mushroomed since the economic crisis. She was forced out of the apartment she had lived in for seventy years because the real-estate firm that had acquired it, Urbagestión, quintupled her rent to above the value of her pension, and, during the legal dispute between the two, did not offer her an affordable alternative. But the resident of the relatively wealthy neighbourhood of the Retiro was just as much an example of resistance, having pushed back three previous eviction attempts with support of the Tennats’ Union. , She consistently put out videoed messages encouraging the population to resist housing abuses while in the hospital bed she was moved to, after stress destroyed her health. Horrendously, she died there on 7 October: a martyr in the housing struggle.

Her case lit a fuse across the whole Spain, although particularly in Madrid where Maricarmen. Millions could identify with her plight because it chimed with their own experience. Pablo Iglesias, former Podemos leader, provided the statistics on this:

Over the past decade, on average [across Spain,] wages have risen by 26 per cent, while rents have gone up by 40 per cent and house prices by 60 per cent .... (In the biggest cities, the situation is far worse)... The average rent is equivalent, get this, to 99 per cent of the average wage earned by a young person. Young people in Spain leave home at 30, compared with an EU average of 26. In 2008, 66 per cent of under-35s owned their own homes. Today, that figure is just 37 per cent... Every day, 40 vulnerable families are evicted, including seriously disabled 87-year-old women. And if you don’t like it, there’ll be 50 riot police on hand... Spain has half a million tourist flats and three million empty homes...

The situation requires that,

rents be lowered by law; contracts be made permanent; the properties of big landlords be expropriated; tourist lets and properties held for speculation be banned; and all evictions of vulnerable people lacking alternative accommodation be definitively prohibited”

This was “a maximal programme”, as opposed to a “sham resolution that leaves the underlying problem unresolved”.

This is all quite correct, but Iglesias fails to mention one important thing: When he was deputy to President Sánchez, before Podemos left the government, a housing law was passed that was precisely the kind of sham he now warns against and has ensured the extreme situation he now denounces. While Podemos and minister allies that would split off to stay in the government and form “Sumar” were fighting over who should claim responsibility for the law, Iglesias described it as one of Podemos’ “most significant political successes”.

Housing activists denounced the law at the time for awarding the responsibility for implementing the measures to the Autonomous Communities (regions and historic nations, ACs). As the overwhelming majority of these were run by the right, this would meant non-application in most of the Spanish state, which is what has happened. Furthermore, loopholes in the law meant that where it was applied (Catalonia and the Basque Country) no regulation of tourist accommodation accompanied it. And it is precisely that accommodation – forming a third of all in Barcelona– that has so reduced the supply of housing for local people and has pushed rental prices through the roof. Furthermore, neither Podemos nor Sumar have managed to force their PSOE partner to scrap a Tory “gag law” that was introduced to crack down on anti-eviction protests, and which was a policy in the original coalition government agreement.

The record of the “town halls of change” was not qualitatively different. This was even the case in Barcelona where the mayor was former housing activist Ada Colau – at present the general-election candidate for the left forces (Sumar, ex-Communists,...) that have propped up the Socialist administration as junior partners. Her municipal team did bring about more social-housing construction in Barcelona and were helpful intermediaries when evictions were actively opposed. Yet under her watch at least 13,000 evictions were carried out in the city, as documented by the judiciary.

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The same source says 90,000 evictions have taken place across Spain since the housing law was passed in 2023, evictions that often end in homelessness or suicides. This catastrophe could have been avoided if the so-called ‘new politics’ had simply defended the policies put forward by the housing movement itself, as (Unidos) Podemos initially did, before doing a pragmatic deal with the PSOE.

These failures and betrayals have not stopped those responsible from now joining the mass protests (accompanied by their advisors and press teams). There, they vent their rage towards the right-wing AC governments for not applying the law, in the process evading their own responsibility, and demonstrating, not for the first time, how they have become absorbed into the cretinism of parliamentary politics. This has been particularly lamentable in the case of Sumar and co., now standing in the election as the Broad Left, who have hitched their wagon tightly to Pedro Sánchez. For the international left, Sánchez has often, understandly, be seen as simply a decent and progressive leader in a world increasingly lacking these, due to his eventual criticism of the genocide in Palestine, clear opposition to the Iran war, and regularisation of half a million migrants. None of this is to be belittled and it has helped clarify how rotten other so-called left leaders are. But in Spain Sánchez is seen as big on political gestures and on ideological and electoral differentiation from the right, while having an awful record at reigning in the cost-of-living crisis, of which rent increases are a major ingredient, or carrying out the decisive practical steps that can force wars to end.

 Despite the coalition parties’ attempts otherwise, Maricarmen’s death cannot simply be blamed on the non-application of the 2023 law by the right-winger, Isabel Ayuso, running the Madrid region, notwithstanding the fact that Ayuso prioritised helping herself personally to a large attic belonging to the AC while allowing evictions of the poor to run rampant. The ministry of housing in the “most progressive government in [Spanish] history” could have given Maricarmen alternative housing and chose not to. More crucially the 2023 law did not remedy the previous scrapping of historic rental contracts that prevented rent increases of the kind Abascal suffered. Even if the law had been in force in Madrid, Maricarmen likely would have been evicted anyway.

A harder and more-strategic square revolt

I discuss the left’s failures not out of any enjoyment for doing such. Rather, it is necessary to identify them to understand both the nature of the new mass struggle or the current political moment. The occupation of Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and, later, other city squares have taken the same visible form as the famous “Indignados” protests that took place fifteen years ago and which became the launchpad for the “new politics” already referred to. Both revolts involved a new generation in street politics and surpassed habitual protests in terms of size, social composition and political energy even within the context of the rise of Vox, Spain’s far-right party. However, as Núria Alabao and Javier Moreno-Zacarés have identified in impressive comparisons between the movements, there are also notable and welcome differences with the earlier movement known as “15-M". In Moreno-Zacarés’ words, “there is less blue-sky philosophizing and more strategic discussion; less spontaneity and more coordination of an agreed calendar of escalation. The festive mood of the first iteration has given way to one of discipline”.

According to different observers, the Madrid revolt has been dominated by two organisations, something that would not have happened in 15-M, where formal organisations were banned. Indeed, this shift, as Alabao contends, has meant more “conscious” development of the movement (as this has benefited from collective reflection on different interventions over time) and providing the movement with "direction”. 

The giant Madrid demonstration, on 26 September, and subsequent square occupation was called by the Sindicato de Inquilinos (SI). Since its creation in Barcelona in 2017, the union has taken the baton of central housing movement (within an impressive and varied housing-activist panorama) from the Platform of those Affected by Mortgages (PAH). The PAH attempted, which many local successes, to stop a tsunami of evictions of those unable to meet their mortgage payments during the 2008-2014 crisis. Thanks to its impressive assembly-based organising and direct action, the PAH helped self-empower a layer of working people –mainly women and often migrant- to “put their body” to block the enforcement of unjust laws. When its widely supported attempt to spearhead a reform of Spanish law was blocked by the dominant parties (including the PSOE), much of its leadership, including Colau, made the leap into institutional politics themselves. In some cities, including Barcelona, this led to a decapitation of the PAH. Along the way, however, the PAH did score many local victories and help bring about a decrease in evictions. The banks, feeling the backlash and having accrued excessive numbers of empty properties, tightened up the financial conditions for families to access a mortgage, which also reduced evictions in the longer term. Those on a low income increasingly had to turn to the rental market for their housing, enabling what was a previously small market to flourish and grow

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There has been resistance – including from inside the PSOE – to reigning in the rent excesses described above, as happened regarding the mortgage bubble before. This is partly because housing is at the centre of the Iberian model of development. Thanks to increased housing prices, developers, builders and banks gain massive profits while a mass of homeowners borrow and spend more, because they feel better off'. Tourism and hosting international events, also key components in the Iberian economy, help push real-estate prices further upwards. Meanwhile, a complementary rental market creates additional wealth for an estimated as much as 15 per cent of the population who receive income from renting out.

The SI has used accumulated activist experience and novel practices to attract bitterly discontented young people in big cities – the group most affected by rent bubbles – as well as older tenants. In Barcelona, 150,000 people joined a protest in late 2024, and important victories have been won by blocks facing evictions or chains of blocks overturning abusive practices by an agency. The city assembly, where dozens of rental cases are discussed every fortnight, is an energising and inspiring organisational hub. Its impressive leadership, often of young women, has so far avoided the lure of ultimately frustrating political “short cuts”, unlike the PAH leaders.[i]

The second organisation key to the movement has taken this author, as well as many others, by surprise. This is the relatively new revolutionary Marxist youth organisation the Socialist Youth Platform (CJS), which is part of the Socialist Movement (MS). It has filled Sol with red flags, hard politics, and sharp slogans, and has been credited with leading the demand for a general strike, which was eventually endorsed by the large union federations. Its Jodi Dean-type strategy of building strong communist parties over fluffier movement spaces, has not always been welcome in those same movements, and there have been some local debates over CJS members’ ability to work well in broader and more plural spaces. Yet in the CJS’s two short years, beginning with a split from the increasingly social-democratic pro-independence left in the Basque country, the organisation has spread to different ACs, pulled off several hundreds-strong meetings, and developed a cadre that combines a no-nonsense hard politics with a strategic maturity that gives importance to winning concrete reforms along the road to revolution. Whereas the “new politics” leaders devoted time and energy on how to intervene in the media, the new generation is discussing how to intervene in a flawed union movement. Like SI members, it is preparing for the general strike through active neighbourhood strike committees.

What has given an edge to the new organisations, and movement, has been how they have been born, to one degree or another, out of a critique of the 15-M wave and particularly the left-reformist dead end it went down. We must leave for another time the important discussion over whether more promising alternative roads were available for 15-M generation, including more radical institutional project like Adelante Andalucía, led by the Trotskyist Anticapitalistas, which recently won eight seats in the Andalusian parliament. But, clearly, young activists in Sol that reject 15-M “horizontalism”, for bringing about unelected leaderships based on social-media followings and who oppose the idea that substantial change can come through the institutions, might well have something important to offer.

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Sánchez’s even-riskier new gamble

A fascinating official CIS social survey published in September also helps us understand the ideological shift expressed in Sol. It found that no less than one in four Spaniards now self-identify as being on the far left This is 5 per cent higher than the amount of people placing themselves in the positions traditionally corresponding to social-democratic voters. With extreme-right identification also climbing to reach 9 per cent, it is easy to conclude that sharp ideological polarisation is occurring. On the left, this will have been encouraged by the radical youth revolts currently taking place in other European countries, most dramatically by high-school students in neighbouring France. And behind these revolts is a backdrop of permanent war, videoed genocide, far-right reaction, and very possible civilisational collapse. It is hardly the time to be a social democrat!

Yet Pedro Sánchez is trying to ride the “bucking bronco” of the housing movement to cling on to power. As well as now trying to pass his frustrated housing reforms by decree, including a far-reaching one, he has (once again) radicalised his discourse. Most surprisingly (and vacuously) his 5 October speech framed the elections as being about “subduing very powerful economic elites” to bring about reform.[ii] As he has previously showed over Palestine, etc., when he smells widespread discontent among people on the left, he is willing to make turns, even if only temporarily, to stay on the right side of history. Because there are now so many Spaniards on the hard left of the political spectrum that might be mobilised to vote for one of the two coalition partners, even if only to stop the right or hope for a home they can afford, this is not a crazy strategy, and the “stop Vox” approach worked in 2023. Not dissimilar tactics have just worked for President Lula in Brazil.

But Sánchez’ strategy will be hazardous in the least. First, it requires him to keep housing at the centre of the debate, something which a second giant mortal train disaster and transparent attempts by the PSOE transport minister to pin their responsibility for this on others are now complicating. Second, if the PSOE does manage to keep housing centre stage, it will be trying to mobilise people precisely around the issue that the movement denounces the government for failing on... Thirdly, if he were to win, as Moreno-Zacarés points out, he will likely soon face opposition from the hardened movements and activist groups described above.

 A final weak point in his gamble is that he was able to cling on to office in 2023 because the left of the PSOE, including his coalition partners, gained a respectable vote. It is an open question whether this will be repeated. Maybe the "clunky” alliance between Podemos and the pro-independence Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), led here by the popular and powerful propagandist Gabriel Rufián, will mobilise the more critical left vote. And social explosions often add votes to different forces on the left. Furthermore, Colau does have an appeal among left voters and even activists –particularly outside Barcelona.

On the other hand, the attempt to build a genuine “broad left” including all these forces became amputated after they manoeuvred and publicly quarrelled to gain prime positions within it; while Rufián, who it was hoped would be the leading figure in it, was stopped from being so by his party. How strange that a pro-independence Catalan party like ERC would not want a leading member to become a member of the Spanish government! While an “alternative” left divided between a PSOE-friendly alliance and PSOE-critical alliance may actually appeal to a greater number of people – including leftists unimpressed by the coalition government and those who support its new housing reforms– all of the organisations concerned will have to struggle to put behind the pathetic start to their campaigns.

The housing revolt does not simply take us back to 2011. It has arisen in a period in which the psychological insecurity caused by a multiplication of crisis and disasters is being increasingly mis-channelled against migrants, as seen over the Ceuta crisis, and the poor, as shown by the still-considerable opposition to those who squat in order to have a place to live (itself an indication of the limits to the increased awareness over housing that still exist). Precisely because we are entering such a dangerous crossroads, the struggle inspired by Maricarmen’s heroism is so crucial. 11 November will be its next test.