Congress rejects both Sánchez housing decrees, 178-172 and 184-166

Spain's Congress rejected both of the government's emergency housing decrees on Friday, 2 October. The first fell by 178 votes to 172. The second fell by 184 to 166. In a 350-seat chamber those margins are not close enough to blame on a handful of absences. Pedro Sánchez had asked his allies, in a last appeal before the vote, to keep the decrees alive. They did not.

The decrees were written after the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, 87, from her home, and after the street protests that followed. Decree-laws in Spain take effect when the cabinet approves them, then die unless Congress ratifies them inside a set period. Friday was that ratification. Hundreds of people stood outside the chamber. After the numbers were announced they chanted "shame on you" and "your profits, our misery."

What was in the two texts

The first decree would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, extended by two years any rental lease due to expire before 2028, raised taxes on tourist apartments, and restricted purchases of homes by funds the government calls vulture funds. It also carried tax incentives meant to push owners toward long lets and toward building. The second decree would have made expiring residential leases renew on their own, in effect without a fixed end, and would have required an owner who wanted to break that renewal to pay the tenant 12 months of rent.

Junts, the right-wing Catalan separatist party whose votes have kept Sánchez's minority government in office on other bills, refused both texts. It said the measures would tighten the housing market rather than loosen it. The centre-right Popular Party and Vox voted no as well. Between those three groups the government did not have a majority, and the two tallies show it. The second decree, the automatic renewal, lost by a wider gap, 184 to 166, which is the text landlords had called an indefinite lease by another name.

The eviction that set the calendar

Abascal's removal is the fact the protests organised around. She is 87. The government answered with decrees rather than with a full statute, which would have needed a longer committee process and the same unreliable majority. A decree-law is fast and brittle. It can be in the official gazette within days. It can also be erased by one afternoon in Congress, which is what happened.

The practical result is that the protections named in the two texts do not stay in force. Evictions of vulnerable tenants are not frozen until 2030 by this vote. Leases due before 2028 do not gain the two-year extension this vote would have given them. Tourist-apartment taxes and the fund-purchase limit in the first decree fall with it. Owners are not required, by the second decree, to pay 12 months' rent to end a renewal, because that renewal rule is not law.

Sánchez's coalition was already governing without a stable majority. Losing a pair of decrees he had tied to a named eviction, in public, with demonstrators at the door, adds a date his opponents will use when they argue for an early election. The constitution does not force one from a lost decree. It does leave him without the housing answer he offered the street. The next text, if he brings one, will have to be built for Junts or for some other group that voted no on Friday, and the vote counts that group rejected are now on the record: 178-172, and 184-166.