Maria del Carmen Abascal, 87, died Wednesday after being hospitalised for severe anxiety and exhaustion following her eviction on a stretcher from the Madrid apartment she had occupied for 70 years. She had reached a deal to return home but died before she could. No official cause of death has been announced. Thousands gathered outside Spain's parliament and at her former building, leaving flowers, candles, and handwritten notes. Protesters chanted "They're not deaths; they're murders" as they marched from the Puerta del Sol camp to her home. Her eviction on September 23 had already ignited nationwide housing protests. Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez called a snap general election for November 29 after parliament failed to pass emergency housing measures. The timing is nakedly political: Sanchez is betting that housing anger translates into left-leaning votes before the fury dissipates or gets redirected. The tributes inside Spain's legislatures became their own battleground. Conservative opposition leader Alberto Nunez Feijoo accused Sanchez and the Socialists of exploiting Abascal's death for electoral gain, saying "all of this has happened during their eight years in government." The People's Party, which holds absolute majorities in both Madrid's regional and local assemblies, refused to observe a minute of silence. Hard-left deputies staged one outside City Hall and gave Abascal a 60-second standing ovation in the regional assembly while PP lawmakers sat with folded arms. The performative grief on both sides obscures the structural failure. A CIS poll published Thursday found 76.3 percent of Spaniards support government intervention to guarantee housing access, and 79 percent believe the right to housing should take precedence over treating homes as market commodities. These are not marginal positions. They represent a supermajority consensus that neither governing coalition nor opposition has translated into policy. Ombudsman Angel Gabilondo acknowledged the scale of the problem, saying his office was preparing a housing report and reiterating proposals to expand public housing, restrict tourist rentals, increase rent assistance, and strengthen eviction protections for vulnerable households. These are familiar prescriptions. Spain's public housing stock remains among the lowest in Western Europe, and tourist rental platforms continue to hollow out urban housing supply in Madrid, Barcelona, and coastal cities. The snap election creates a peculiar dynamic: every party now has an incentive to talk about housing and no incentive to pass legislation before November 29. Sanchez wants the crisis as a campaign issue, not a solved problem. Feijoo wants to pin blame on eight years of Socialist governance. Neither trajectory produces housing. The protesters outside parliament understand this intuitively — their anger is directed at the system, not a party. Abascal's case is individually tragic and systemically ordinary. Spain's eviction rate has been elevated since the 2008 financial crisis, and the combination of stagnant wages, surging rents, and minimal public housing stock means that vulnerable tenants — elderly, low-income, precarious workers — face displacement with no safety net. The snap election may reshuffle the government, but without structural investment in public housing and enforceable tenant protections, the next Maricarmen is already living in her apartment, waiting.
