Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the call of early elections for November 29, dissolving both houses of Parliament with a statement from the Moncloa Palace. The decision comes after weeks of growing tensions in the country, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets to protest against the housing crisis and, above all, after the Congress of Deputies’ rejection of two law decrees with which the government intended to strengthen protection for tenants and combat real estate speculation.
The vote against by some parties such as the Partido Popular (PP), Vox and Junts per Catalunya has made clear what has been perceived for months: the fragile parliamentary majority that brought Sánchez’s progressive party to government in 2023 no longer works today. The socialist prime minister therefore decided to leave the choice to the voters, trying to exploit social discontent to face the electoral battle in slightly better conditions than a few weeks ago, when the poor management of the Ceuta crisis had caused consensus towards Sánchez’s party, the PSOE, to collapse.
The protests that are shaking Spain and the case of Maricarmen
To understand why this decision has come now, we need to take a step back: peaceful protests against the housing crisis have been underway in the Iberian country for almost two weeks. The fuse that lit the mobilizations was the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman forced to leave the apartment in Madrid, where she had lived for over seventy years, after a real estate investment company (in Spanish defined as abuitre bottom“, i.e. a vulture fund) had purchased the property and increased the rent by over 230%, making the old woman’s stay unsustainable. The images of Maricarmen being taken away on a stretcher, after the police had broken down the door, sparked a wave of indignation that quickly went beyond the borders of the capital.
Already on September 26, tens of thousands of people had begun to march through the streets of Madrid: a group of demonstrators then camped with tents in the Puerta del Sol, the central square symbol of the capital (which is also the seat of the Presidency of the Community of Madrid, governed by the conservative Isabel Díaz Ayuso). The encampment, visible in the video below, has become the visual symbol of the protest and has resisted eviction attempts: just today, 5 October, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid rejected the request of the regional government of Madrid to force the eviction of the square, protecting the demonstrators’ right to assembly.
But the protest did not remain confined to Madrid, spreading to over 50 cities (from Bilbao to Salamanca, from Oviedo to Palma de Mallorca) after the Congress of Diputados (the Spanish equivalent of our Chamber of Deputies) rejected the two law decrees proposed by the government coalition dedicated to housing. More specifically, the decrees aimed to limit the increase in rent prices, including a ban on evictions until 2030 and prohibiting hedge funds from buying properties for less than 70% of their value until 2028.
The two texts did not reach the necessary majority due to party opposition Junts for Catalunyaa centre-right Catalan independence party whose votes, as we will see, are essential for the governing coalition.
In Valencia there were clashes between protesters and police, with arrests and injured officers, when a march tried to reach the Palau de les Arts, where a convention of real estate companies was being held. In other cities the protests were peaceful, with demonstrators waving their house keys (which became the symbol of the mobilization) and chanting calls for a general strike, a moratorium on evictions and structural interventions on the rental market. In Madrid, four columns of protesters from the north, south, east and west of the capital converged on the central Plaza de Cibeles.
Because Sánchez called early elections right now
The main problem is that Sánchez’s government does not have large numbers in Parliament: in the 2023 elections, in fact, the most voted party was the Partido Popular (PP), but Sánchez’s Socialist Party (PSOE) had managed to form a coalition government with Sumar (which will present itself in the November 29 elections under the name of Frente Amplio). For the first time in Spain’s recent history, the leader of the party with the most votes, in this case the PP, was not sworn in as president, with Sánchez retaining the presidency through a complex web of pacts.
In practice, this government coalition has just 147 deputies out of 350 in Congress, far below the absolute majority of 176. To approve any measure, Sánchez was forced to build variable majorities, seeking from time to time the votes of regionalist and independentist parties such as Junts, ERC, EH Bildu and PNV. In short, an extremely fragile context to govern.
The crucial issue was the role of Junts for Catalunyathe party of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont. Junts had agreed to support Sánchez as the new prime minister in 2023 in exchange for an amnesty law for those convicted of the “procés”, the Catalan secessionist crisis of 2017. But as the months passed, and with the progressive shift of the agenda from the territorial to the economic and social level, the distance between Junts and the majority grew, leading the Catalan party to vote more and more often with PP and Vox, its historic opponents.
The rejection of the two housing decrees has put the government face to face with a now undeniable reality: with these numbers in Parliament, Sánchez’s party has no possibility of approving measures of real importance, nor the ability to present the first budgets of the legislature (after three years without a budget law, an unprecedented fact in the recent history of Spain).
After a weekend of consultations with ministers, PSOE leaders and allies, Sánchez then decided to dissolve the Cortez (the Chambers that make up the Spanish Parliament). According to experts, the socialist party would like to exploit the social discontent over the housing crisis to obtain a larger pool of votes (and therefore a more solid majority than the current one), at a more politically favorable moment than other crises that had involved the government, from the Ceuta migration issue to the corruption scandals that affected some of the people closest to Sánchez. Polls, in fact, show that a majority of citizens (including right-wing voters) are in favor of measures such as limiting rental prices.
Sánchez’s bet, therefore, is clear: to try to mobilize that progressive electorate disillusioned by a particularly agitated legislature, so as to obtain the “much larger progressive majority” that he invoked in his declaration. The premises, however, are not simple: according to the most recent polls, PP and Vox combined would exceed 50% of the votes, with the PP around 143 seats and Vox at 61, while the PSOE would stop at around 103-106. To make the picture even more complicated, the left-wing Sumar party (future Frente Amplio) does not yet have a defined candidate.
