Sanchez approves the housing decrees parliament rejected and sets a 29 November vote

Spain's cabinet on Tuesday approved two housing decrees that parliament rejected last week, the rejection that led Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call a snap election for 29 November. The measures include rent caps, a temporary ban on evictions, and limits on corporate purchases of homes. Sanchez told a press conference the package was "based on plain common sense" and said surveys showed the public favoured intervention in the property market.

The election had been due in 2027. Sanchez said on Monday he was bringing it forward because the failure to pass his housing bills showed he needed more seats. Calling the vote let the government put the rules through a smaller caretaker body rather than the full Congress that had just defeated them.

The 69-member workaround

The standing body has 69 members once lower-house speaker Francina Armengol, of Sanchez's Socialist Party, is counted. State broadcaster TVE said that body has a slim majority for the measures. A second decree, on automatic renewal of rental contracts, does not take effect on the government's signature alone. Sanchez said it comes into force only if the reduced legislature approves it, because the government did not have a majority to validate it.

The sequence is the part that will be argued for the next seven weeks. Congress voted the package down on Friday. The prime minister answered by dissolving toward a November ballot and by passing the same ideas through a committee that his party can hold. The rent caps and the eviction pause are therefore in force without the majority that failed last week. The renewal rule is not.

The numbers both sides are using

Housing has topped voter concerns in Spanish polls for three years, ahead of immigration and the economy, Reuters reported. Most Spaniards own their homes. The pressure sits on younger renters who cannot buy and, increasingly, cannot rent. Alberto Nunez Feijoo, leader of the People's Party, has promised 250,000 new homes a year and 600,000 jobs tied to the building programme if he wins. "If Spaniards give me their trust, my priority, my success, will be housing policy," he said. September voting-intention polls put the People's Party near 33 percent and the Socialists near 26.

The fight that triggered the dissolution was concrete before it was electoral. An attempted eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid set off nationwide protests, including calls for a general strike before the vote. Sanchez said his government would respect that strike call. The decrees he signed on Tuesday include the temporary eviction ban that the protests demanded and that Friday's Congress refused.

What a November majority would lock in

A Socialist-led government with more seats could validate the rental-renewal decree and keep the caps. A People's Party government has already said it will drop the caps, on the argument that they choke supply, and build instead. The Association of Property Developers of Madrid has sided with the supply argument. Renters' groups have sided with the cap. Neither has a seat total yet.

The ballot is on 29 November. Between now and then the caps and the eviction pause operate under a signature that Congress declined to give. That is the fact candidates on both sides will have to defend at every rally between this Tuesday and the count.