Housing Revolt Shakes Spanish State

On September 23rd Maricarmen Abascal was evicted from her Madrid apartment. There was an intense public backlash and protest encampments were set up in public spaces like Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

Tens of thousands marched in Madrid. The Sindicato de Inquilinas, a tenant union, called the protests. The trade unions stepped in to support activists’ calls for protests.

Spain’s two largest trade union federations, CCOO and UGT, have agreed to begin preparations for a 24-hour nationwide general strike this autumn. They are tying the demand for affordable housing to the demand for better wages for workers.

The protests are also fuelled by disappointment with the soft left Socialist Party government of Pedro Sánchez, who promised a lot and then compromised with the system. The same thing happens over and over with Labour style governments.

His government has been in power for eight years yet the housing crisis has continued to escalate. That’s why many protesters saw his emergency proposals on housing as too little too late.

More than 25,500 evictions were carried out in 2025 alone. The government did nothing to stop this.

The Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez is a multi-property owner and suggested that the housing crisis could be solved if landlords volunteered to keep rent prices low!

The government also includes the left wing coalition Sumar. When the government was formed, Sumar took five out of twenty two ministerial seats in the cabinet.

Sumar campaigned on housing rights but then just accepted a governing agreement that left the Ministry of Housing in the hands of the landlord-friendly Socialist Party (PSOE).

Protesters realise the government does not represent the working class. Protesters have been chanting: “Where is the progressive government?”, “PSOE and Sumar, traitors responsible!” and “Who are you governing for?”

While Sumar propped up a useless moderate government the housing crisis has reached disaster levels. There is a shortage of 700,000 houses. Nearly half of private tenants are in poverty. Over 34,000 need homeless shelters. Meanwhile, 32 Spanish billionaires have €182 billion between them.

The protests brought the government down as the Socialist Party was forced to call a snap election. The whole saga just shows that electing a parliamentary left government does not put workers in the driving seat. The establishment still run the show with their control over the state bureaucrats and control over the economy.

The union leaders are close to the Socialist Party and are already trying to get out of the strike call. UGT General Secretary Pepe Álvarez said the general strike is “easy to announce and register, and somewhat more complicated to carry out.”

The only way to actually put workers in the driving seat is to have all the most militant housing activists and workers in one party that challenges the rule of the establishment and their soft left pets and fights for more than just running the current system.

A successful strike movement would require assemblies in workplaces across the country. Those assemblies are the basis of a future workers’ parliament. It would take a rebellion to dismantle the current rotten state and replace it.

The French revolutionary St. Just once said that: “Those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own graves.”

This is true of the Spanish government as polls show the conservatives and the right on the rise. The failure of the soft left opens the way for the return of the right. The cycle repeats itself. The system survives.

The Spanish housing protests show the potential to break out of that cycle. But it’s going to take a battle in the unions, in the estates and on the streets to even think about walking the path of real working class rebellion. But there’s no other way out!