Fifty cities marched on Saturday after the Congress of Deputies voted down the government's emergency tenant protections. An 87-year-old's eviction became the symbol; a minority government's arithmetic became the problem.
Published 4 October 2026 · 06:00 GMT
On Saturday, October 3, tens of thousands of Spaniards took to the streets in more than fifty cities to demand affordable housing, a day after the Congress of Deputies voted down two emergency decree-laws put forward by Pedro Sánchez's minority government. In Madrid, about 70,000 people marched on the government's count — organisers claimed half a million — converging on Plaza de Cibeles after a week of protests that began with the stretcher-bound eviction of an 87-year-old woman from the Madrid flat she had lived in for seven decades.
Madrid has heard keys before — car keys on election nights, the clatter of protest bells — but on Saturday it heard house keys, tens of thousands of them shaken over four columns marching toward Cibeles. The Tenants' Union called it the strike of the roof: not a demand for a policy tweak but a verdict on a political class. Twenty-four hours earlier, inside the Congress of Deputies, the arithmetic had spoken: Royal Decree-Law 26/2026 fell 178 to 172, Royal Decree-Law 27/2026 fell 184 to 166.
The executioners were not the usual suspects alone. The conservative Popular Party (137 deputies) and the far-right Vox (32) voted no as a matter of doctrine. The decisive votes belonged to Junts, the seven Catalan separatists Sánchez's investiture depends on, who crossed the floor to vote with the right. Parliament has 350 seats and the PSOE–Sumar coalition holds 147 of them, so the government needs nearly everyone else on every vote. On Friday it got nearly everyone else voting against it.
In Spain the roof has become the ballot box: on Friday the parliament said no, and on Saturday the street said otherwise.
They were marching for a name: Maricarmen. María del Carmen Abascal, 87, partially disabled, was carried out of her Retiro apartment on a stretcher on September 23 after riot police dispersed the neighbours who had blocked three previous attempts. Her father first rented the flat in 1956; in 2018 the building changed hands, and the fund Urbagestión raised her rent from about €500 to €2,650 — later €1,650, still impossible on a pension. After a week of fury the fund offered an eight-year lease at roughly 30 percent of her pension. She got to go home. Spain did not.
Spain's housing numbers have the brutal clarity of a utility bill. The National Statistics Institute puts house prices 12.2 percent higher in the second quarter of 2026 than a year earlier — 12.9 percent for second-hand homes. Rents rose 8.5 percent across the country in 2025 and 9.7 percent in Madrid, per Idealista, and have roughly doubled in a decade to nearly €1,200 a month in the big cities. The Bank of Spain calculates that an average home in 2024 cost 6.8 years of a non-owner household's net income — 9.7 years in Madrid, 10 in Málaga. Wages rose about 30 percent in fifteen years while rents rose 80. There is the whole story, in one ratio.
The pain is not ideological; it is demographic. In 2025, 44.3 percent of Spaniards aged 26 to 34 still lived with their parents, and nearly half of them named unaffordable housing as the reason. The average household is shrinking — from 2.50 people in 2024 toward a projected 2.32 by 2039 — and single-person households are expected to jump 42 percent. Smaller households mean more roofs for the same population, in a country with a median age of 47.2. The Bank of Spain warned in June that 750,000 new homes would be needed, with the deficit projected to pass one million by 2028. This is not a cycle. It is a census.
Opinion has moved faster than the parties. CIS polling finds 86.6 percent of citizens believe a decent home is not within everyone's reach, and 65.9 percent expect getting a first home to get harder. A 40dB. survey taken days before the vote found 67.5 percent back state action to limit housing prices even if landlords earn less — with majorities among PSOE, Sumar, Podemos, PP and Vox voters alike, and even among landlords. Only 21.7 percent say the market alone should decide. When Vox voters and their landlords agree on rent control, the Overton window has not shifted; it has been carried off its hinges.
Every Spanish housing crisis begins in 2008, when the property bubble burst and construction collapsed — today building is about 5.35 percent of GDP, half its pre-crisis share. What got built afterwards was in the wrong places: some 450,000 unsold new homes sit in towns with no demand, while a vacant flat in a shrinking province is no help to a renter in Madrid. Tourist rentals stripped long-term stock, foreign buyers arrived in force, and PP-run regions fought the central state's 2023 Housing Law, refusing to declare the "stressed zones" that would have allowed rent caps. The housing ministry writes the law in Madrid; the regions file it under "optional." The EU is the only superpower that needs a permit to be one; Spain's regions sometimes seem to need one to let Madrid be the capital.
Then came a September that read like a scripted indictment. Early in the month, a 54-year-old woman evicted in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, Olga Matute, took her own life — her eviction had resumed after Congress struck down the pandemic-era moratorium extension in April. Through the summer it emerged that the Madrid regional government had spent €6.3 million on a luxury penthouse amid murky explanations about whether it was an office or a residence for premier Isabel Díaz Ayuso. In Alicante, public housing had gone to PP officials and their relatives, and a judicial probe was opened. Into this landscape walked Maricarmen on her stretcher, and between 25,000 and 300,000 people walked out behind her on September 26 — then refused to go home. By September 30, more than 1,200 tents stood in Puerta del Sol.
The decrees put to Congress on September 29 were drafted in that heat. The first would have banned evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, banned vulture funds from buying homes until 2028, extended rental contracts expiring before the end of 2028 by two years, tightened temporary and room rentals, raised VAT to 10 percent on tourist apartments, cut it to 4 percent for construction, and offered zero-interest loans up to €50,000 for first homes. The second made rental contracts automatically renewable and capped rent increases at 2 percent through 2027. Health Minister Mónica García said the package would have helped over five million people. The tenants' unions called the texts a starting point and demanded passage anyway. Junts demanded withdrawal.
Junts spokesperson Miriam Nogueras framed the "no" as doctrine: the decrees would shrink rental supply and scare off small landlords, and her seven deputies would not be pressured by a government she accused of acting "in electoral terms." She rejected the photograph the Socialists were selling — Junts voting shoulder to shoulder with PP and Vox — as stagecraft. PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo opposed the decrees before their contents were even public, and after the vote dared Sánchez to name an election date, calling the ballot a veiled vote of confidence. Vox blamed the crisis on immigration and demanded mass deportations, which is the party's answer to every question including, presumably, the weather.
The unions are now the ones holding meetings. The Tenants' Union, through spokeswoman Valeria Racu, says talks with the labour movement have begun on a general strike — and Spain's two big confederations, CCOO and UGT, urged citizens into the streets and are weighing whether to back it. An online campaign flooded deputies' inboxes with more than 300,000 emails in 24 hours before the vote. The street has noticed the irony: the PP-Vox-Junts majority that killed the decrees is the same alignment that in April struck down the moratorium extension, after which Olga Matute's eviction resumed. Voters do not need a chart to connect those dots; they have the dates.
The question in every Madrid newsroom is the one on Saturday's placards: does this trigger a snap election? Spanish media report that Sánchez will spend the weekend measuring the protests — El País says he is gauging "the scope of social discontent against the right" — with 29 November 2026 floated as a possible date, well ahead of the August 2027 deadline. His office refused to comment. With 147 seats he cannot legislate, but an election fought on housing is fought on terrain where the polls lean his way — 40dB.'s numbers show the public further left on housing than on almost anything else, even among PP and Vox voters. Losing a parliament to win a campaign is not usually a plan. In this case it might be the only one that reads as honesty.
The economics keep their own calendar. Spain is a $2.361 trillion economy in purchasing-power terms (2024), the eurozone's strongest large-economy grower at 3.2 percent that year — see the Spain country file — and yet its construction sector cannot close a gap the central bank puts at 750,000 homes. Permits crawl, buildable land is scarce, and tourism keeps converting bedrooms into revenue streams: Barcelona's tourist-rental battles, now exported to Portugal and France, show a continent-wide pattern, not a Spanish exception. Junts's supply-side argument is not frivolous — controls that scare landlords off the market can shrink supply — but in a country with 1.95 million people in "hidden poverty" once housing costs are counted, per the Fedea think tank, the counter-argument is not theory. It is a queue outside a rental agency.
Saturday ended with rubber bullets in two cities for opposite reasons: in Valencia, police fired them at protesters who tried to storm a real-estate investment conference at the Palau de les Arts — nine officers injured, five detained — and in Madrid, at far-right activists assaulting the Puerta del Sol camp, three detained. A housing movement that draws fire from ultras and storms investors' conferences in one afternoon is not a single-issue campaign; it is a country arguing about what property is for. The keys over Cibeles were the honest symbol: in Spain the roof has become the ballot box, and on Friday the ballot box said no. The street, on Saturday, said otherwise. The next entry is Sánchez's — and Europe's protest summer, see our France school-protest coverage, suggests the street is not done voting.
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On 2 October 2026, the Congress of Deputies voted down two emergency decree-laws: 178–172 against the first (eviction ban to 2030, vulture-fund purchase ban to 2028) and 184–166 against the second (automatic lease renewal, rent-increase caps). The PP and Vox opposed them on principle; Junts, whose seven votes the government needed, argued the measures would shrink rental supply and hurt small landlords.
María del Carmen Abascal, 87, was evicted on 23 September from the Madrid flat she had lived in since her father first rented it in 1956. The investment fund Urbagestión raised her rent from about €500 to €2,650; police carried her out on a stretcher after dispersing neighbours who blocked earlier attempts. The images made her a national symbol of the rental crisis, and the fund later let her return on an eight-year lease at 30% of her pension.
House prices rose 12.2% year-on-year in Q2 2026 (INE) and rents have roughly doubled in a decade. The Bank of Spain says an average home costs 6.8 years of a non-owner household's net income — 9.7 in Madrid. In 2025, 44.3% of 26–34-year-olds lived with their parents, and the central bank warns 750,000 new homes are needed. Some 86.6% of citizens say decent housing is out of everyone's reach.
Spanish media report he will decide over the weekend after measuring the scale of the 3 October protests, with 29 November 2026 floated as a possible date — well before the August 2027 constitutional deadline. His office refused to comment. PP leader Feijóo dared him to name a date. The gamble: a campaign fought on housing is one where polls — even among PP and Vox voters — lean toward intervention, which is Sánchez's terrain.
The Tenants' Union wants the full "Maricarmen decree": automatic lease renewal, a ban on evictions of vulnerable tenants, rent freezes and tight control of tourist and room rentals — going further than the government's rejected texts. Spokeswoman Valeria Racu says talks have begun with labour unions about a general strike, and Spain's two big confederations, CCOO and UGT, urged citizens into the streets and are weighing their support.
