House call: Spain’s snap election

Pedro Sánchez, Spain’s prime minister, called a snap election for late November after his signature housing bill failed in parliament. The trigger was the eviction of an 87-year-old woman named María Carmen Abascal from the Madrid flat she had lived in for 70 years, after a property firm raised her rent fivefold. The incident ignited nationwide protests, and Sánchez bet that channeling public anger over housing could reverse his government’s declining fortunes. Michael Reed, The Economist’s Spain correspondent, explains the calculation and the odds.

Why housing became the defining issue

Spain faces a severe housing deficit. The Bank of Spain estimates a shortfall of 750,000 housing units, and only about 80,000 are built each year. Meanwhile, Sánchez’s immigration policies have added roughly 700,000 new households in the past three years alone. The arithmetic is brutal: supply cannot keep pace with demand, rents rise, and vulnerable tenants are squeezed out. Sánchez’s proposed decree would have extended existing rental contracts automatically, barred evictions of vulnerable people for two years, and prevented commercial firms from buying residential property. This approach—rent controls and tenant protections—aligns with the global left’s response to housing affordability crises. But the measure failed because one of the coalition partners Sánchez relied on for his fragi