Spain's minority government lost both of its emergency housing decrees on Friday, killed in the 350-seat Congress by a coalition that stretches from the far-right Vox through the centre-right Popular Party to the Catalan separatist Junts. The votes leave Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez without any legislative vehicle to address a housing crisis that has put hundreds of thousands of young Spaniards on the street — literally, in the case of the Puerta del Sol encampment that has occupied central Madrid since late September. The first decree was the substantive one: it would have blocked evictions of vulnerable tenants, imposed restrictions on short-term rentals, created tax incentives for landlords who rent at affordable rates, and tightened rules on speculative property purchases. The second was more radical — automatic lease renewals that would have made rental contracts effectively indefinite, with landlords required to pay 12 months of rent to terminate. Together they represented the most aggressive intervention into Spain's rental market in a generation. Junts, the Catalan separatist party whose votes Sánchez's coalition routinely needs, provided the decisive justification. Its spokesperson Miriam Nogueras argued the decrees would drive landlords to pull properties off the rental market entirely, shrinking supply and pushing prices higher — the classic supply-side objection to rent regulation. The Popular Party and Vox voted against on broader ideological grounds. The result is a government that cannot pass its own emergency legislation despite widespread public fury. The fury has a face: María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman known as Maricarmen, evicted from a Madrid apartment she had lived in her entire life after the investment firm Urbagestion bought the building in 2018 and raised her rent from €500 to €2,650 — nearly double her €1,350 monthly pension. The televised eviction on September 23, carried out on police's fourth attempt against crowds of protesters, became the catalysing image of a crisis that statistics had already documented. Those statistics are stark. According to Idealista, the average rent per square metre in Spain has risen from €8.20 in 2016 to €15.10 in 2025 — an 84% increase in nine years. Outside parliament on Friday, protesters held signs depicting vultures and chanted "your profits, our misery" as lawmakers voted. The camp at Puerta del Sol, now entering its second month, shows no sign of dispersing. The structural problem remains unresolved and possibly unresolvable within Spain's current parliamentary arithmetic. Sánchez leads a coalition of the Socialist Party and the far-left Sumar, but depends on external support from parties like Junts whose interests are regional, not ideological. Any future housing measure must somehow thread the needle between supply-side concerns (Junts), ideological opposition (PP, Vox), and the demand from the streets for immediate relief. The decrees' defeat means Spain's rental market continues to operate without new protections, with eviction law reverting to the status quo. The deeper extraction pattern is familiar across southern Europe: institutional investors and real estate firms acquire housing stock, leverage weak tenant protections to reset rents to market rates, and capture the differential between legacy rents and financialised pricing. The cost falls on long-term tenants, pensioners, and young adults who cannot form independent households. Parliament's failure to act does not create this dynamic — but it removes the only proposed brake on it.
