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Police evicted 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from her Madrid home, sparking mass protests over Spain's housing crisis. The government has announced reforms as evictions exceed 60 per day.
Police in Madrid used a battering ram to break down an apartment door and serve an eviction notice to 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who uses a wheelchair.
Spain Housing Crisis Eviction Sparks Outcry
The operation took nearly three hours as officers peeled protesters from the pavement. As Abascal was carried out of her home of 70 years on a stretcher, her tears became a symbol of Spain's spiralling housing crisis. Hundreds of activists cried out as she was removed, but their mood quickly turned angry. Riot police used batons and shields and had to beat a retreat near Madrid's Retiro park after an ambulance took the pensioner to a city hospital.
A crowd of up to 10,000 people shouted at police: It is not an eviction; it is murder. They then marched across central Madrid to protest outside an apartment block where the regional government purchased a 6.3 million euro penthouse for official use. Abascal has posted video messages from her hospital bed urging protesters to defend their right to a home.
In an interview with Spanish state television on September 22, the eve of the eviction, she criticised Isabel Diaz Ayuso, the regional government's conservative leader, for failing to provide affordable housing for poorer Madrilenos. She blamed other leaders too, but said the main culprit was Spain's left-wing Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez: He either does not know or does not care about the number of evictions that take place every day.
At the weekend, hundreds of activists set up a protest camp in Puerta del Sol to demand no more Maricarmens. With more than 60 evictions taking place every day in Spain, protesters in cities including Barcelona and Seville have launched demonstrations and replica camps with Abascal as their figurehead. Abascal's father signed a rental contract seven decades ago during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, when regulations kept rents low.
Maricarmen Abascal Rental Contract Dispute
His widow inherited the contract but the law does not allow the tenancy agreement to be transferred twice, preventing Abascal from taking it on. In 2018, real estate company Urbagestion bought the apartment and demanded that Abascal pay more than three times her old rent of 500 euros a month. The number of evictions in Spain has fallen from 67,000 in 2015, close to the height of the Eurozone economic crisis, to 24,500 in 2025.
But the proportion of evictions involving tenants has risen from half of the total a decade ago to almost three-quarters today. A shortage of housing in and around Spain's major cities, blamed partly on the popularity of Airbnb and other holiday rentals, has caused real estate prices to spiral. Since 2015, the average house price in Spain has increased by 80 per cent and rents by 87 per cent.
Salaries have risen by 28 per cent, merely keeping pace with inflation over the past decade. The way things are, I am never going to be able to leave my parents house, said Luis Santos, a 23-year-old student of law and philosophy, as he swept clean a patch of the famous Madrid square adjacent to his tent. What happened to Maricarmen has to change; the people who did that are an absolute disgrace.
Protesters Demand Rent Controls and Rights
Housing should be about families needs and not investment funds making money. I feel rage at the impunity of these vulture funds who set rents it is impossible for normal people to pay, said Esther Villardon, a 37-year-old translator and home owner who joined the camp in solidarity with the protesters. From its encampment in Sol, the Tenants Union laid out its demands, including the automatic rollover of rental agreements, protection against eviction and price controls.
It warned: otherwise this progressive government has no reason to exist. Successive governments in Spain have failed to address the housing market's inherent weakness: public housing makes up a mere 1.5 per cent of the total stock, compared with 34 per cent in the Netherlands and 16.4 per cent in the United Kingdom.
With immigration increasing the population, 14 per cent of Spain's 49 million inhabitants are foreigners, the Bank of Spain says the deficit between existing housing units and the number needed has reached 750,000. House prices are rising at an annual rate of 12.5 per cent, but sales and mortgage deals have begun to fall, a clear sign that most ordinary Spaniards are priced out of the market.
Pedro Sanchez Announces Housing Reform Package
On Tuesday Madrid time, Sanchez's cabinet announced a reform package, including anti-eviction measures, the rollover of rent contracts and help for first-time buyers, all of which Congress will need to approve. But Sanchez's coalition has lost any reliable parliamentary majority and similar anti-eviction measures were rejected earlier this year, having been in place since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The government blames the opposition for sabotaging its plan to allow local authorities to impose rent ceilings in areas with the highest demand, with many leaders of the conservative opposition People's Party having refused to enact the measure. The opposition suspects the protests could provide Sanchez with a way to recover from disastrous polling before a general election in 2027.
After a series of corruption scandals concerning senior figures in the prime minister's Spanish Socialist Workers Party and a migration crisis after the Spanish exclave in northern Africa, opposition leaders have accused Sanchez of using the housing crisis to distract from his government's failures.
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theage:This story was compiled and edited by the HeadTopics newsroom and HT AI from the reports above.
Maricarmen Abascal Eviction Madrid Protests Pedro Sanchez Housing Reforms Evictions In Spain
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