Thousands of people marched through Madrid on Saturday to protest the eviction earlier this week of an 87-year-old woman from her lifelong home, calling for greater protection for tenants.
Images of Maricarmen Abascal being carried from her Madrid flat on a stretcher on Wednesday after police broke down her door have thrust Spain‘s housing crisis back into the spotlight ahead of a general election due in 2027.
Protesters chanted slogans and held banners calling for measures to curb rising housing costs and make evictions more difficult as they marched through central Madrid.
“You could be the next Maricarmen,” read one banner.
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Demonstrator Enrique Ortega de Miguel, a 38-year-old graphic designer who lives with his mother, said the housing market in Spain was “impossible”.
“It is a struggle to find a place you can afford, then you live in fear of being forced out,” he said.
Government authorities put the turnout at around 25,000, while organisers of the protest said 300,000 people participated.
‘I want it to encourage people to fight’
Abascal, who has become a symbol of Spain’s housing crisis, urged Spaniards to join the fight in a video message posted online just hours before the protest.
“I want what has happened to me to serve so that it does not happen to other people,” she said from hospital, where she has been treated for exhaustion since her eviction.
“I want it to encourage people to fight and to help change the laws that have allowed me to be evicted,” she added in the video, posted by Spain’s main tenants’ union.
Abascal was forced to leave the apartment where she had lived for 70 years after a real estate firm acquired the property and raised the rent by 275 percent to 2,650 euros ($3,000), according to the union.
Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who last year pledged to make housing a government priority, is under growing pressure to act. There have been regular protests across Spain since Abascal’s eviction.
His government is expected to approve a package of measures dubbed the “Maricarmen decree” at its next cabinet meeting, including the automatic renewal of rental contracts and further restrictions on evictions.
But it is unclear whether the package will be approved by parliament, where Sanchez’s government lacks a majority.
While a similar bill was defeated earlier this year, Abascal’s case has increased pressure on political parties to act.
Housing shortage
Spain has introduced measures in recent years aimed at increasing affordable housing and limiting rent rises, but housing costs remain a major political and social issue.
Short-term tourist rentals such as Airbnb and investment funds are blamed in part for driving up prices and reducing the supply of homes available to residents.
The Bank of Spain estimated that the country had a shortage of about 550,000 homes last year, with Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia accounting for a substantial share.
Spain ranks near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for public rental housing, which represents less than 2 percent of its available supply. The European Union average is 8 percent.
Spain previously built homes with public funds that were later sold into private ownership, removing them from the public housing stock.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and AP)
