Sánchez calls a 29 November election after Congress blocks two housing decrees

Pedro Sánchez told the country on Monday, 5 October, that Spain will vote on 29 November. He spoke from La Moncloa after informing the King, and he said an extraordinary Cabinet meeting would dissolve parliament and call the election. The legislative term was due to run until the summer of 2027. The trigger was not a lost confidence vote. It was the failure, on Friday, of two government decrees meant to tighten protections for tenants.

The decrees did not survive Congress. The People's Party, Vox and Junts per Catalunya voted them down. Junts had negotiated parts of the text with the government and then opposed both measures. That arithmetic is the practical fact of this parliament. Sánchez's coalition has not had a reliable majority for significant legislation, and the housing package was the clearest recent proof.

The BBC reported the content of the blocked measures in outline: a suspension of evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, and an automatic renewal of rental contracts. Once the government re-approves the same measures, which it was expected to do on Tuesday, Sánchez has 30 days to get them ratified. A snap election does not freeze that clock by itself. It does change who will be in the chamber when the next housing fight arrives.

The eviction that set the marches off

The protests that filled streets over the past week began with one Madrid case. Maricarmen Abascal, 87, was evicted after her rent was raised from €500 to €2,650. The landlord later lowered the figure to €1,650. That was still about €300 more than her monthly pension, the BBC reported. The case travelled because the numbers were easy to repeat and because similar jumps have become familiar in Madrid, Barcelona and the coastal cities.

El País reported demonstrations in more than 50 cities, including Barcelona, Valencia, Seville and Málaga, with protest camps in Madrid. Tens of thousands took part. The marches were not only about Abascal. They were about a shortage of affordable rentals, a wave of evictions, and a sense that rent caps, where they exist, have not reached the people who needed them. Housing measures of this kind poll well even among right-leaning voters, which is why the opposition's decision to kill the decrees became a political opening as well as a legislative defeat.

What Sánchez said he wants from the vote

In the Moncloa address Sánchez conceded errors. "We have made mistakes and have not succeeded in accomplishing everything it had set out to do," he said. He also claimed a record: Spain, he said, is the fastest-growing economy in the European Union, and purchasing power has risen three times more than in France or Germany. He then made the electoral ask in plain terms. "To do more, we need the support of the people; we need Parliament to give us a much broader progressive majority."

That is a bet on the street rather than on Junts. The Catalan party has been the hinge of this legislature. When it walks, the government cannot pass emergency decrees. Calling an election nine months early is an attempt to replace that hinge with a larger left bloc. Whether the numbers exist is a separate question.

El País put the People's Party near 30 percent, roughly where it stood in 2023, and described a clear rise for Vox. Alberto Núñez Feijóo had already told Sánchez to call an election, arguing that the prime minister had neither the streets nor parliament. Most published polls before the announcement had the conservatives as the largest party. A largest party is not a majority. Feijóo would still need Vox or a deal with regional parties to form a government, the same constraint that has defined Spanish politics since 2015.

The left's own gap

The government's problem is not only the right. The space that ran as Sumar is reorganising as a Broad Front and, as of the announcement, had no settled candidate. Podemos sits outside that project and can split the vote again. A housing election helps Sánchez only if the parties to his left add seats rather than subtract them. In 2023 the left stayed in office because the right fell short of 176 seats, not because the PSOE won a majority of its own.

Other damage sits in the background of the campaign he has just opened. El País noted the August migration crisis at Ceuta, with more than 80,000 crossings from Morocco cited in coverage of the strain on the government, and a run of judicial cases: former transport minister José Luis Ábalos convicted on corruption charges, former attorney general Álvaro García Ortiz convicted, and inquiries touching a PSOE activist, Leire Díez. Sánchez's wife and brother have also been named in judicial proceedings. None of those cases was the stated reason for the dissolution. All of them will be in the ads.

What changes on 29 November

The calendar is short. Official publication of the call, which Spanish agencies reported as underway on Tuesday, starts the statutory campaign clock. Parties have less than eight weeks to write lists, cut deals in the regions, and decide whether housing is the ballot question or one item among several. The decrees can still be sent back to Congress inside the 30-day ratification window. If they fail again, the next parliament inherits the same eviction rules that produced the Abascal case.

The open question is whether a housing protest translates into seats. Spanish snap elections have a habit of answering a different question from the one the incumbent asked. In 2019 Sánchez went to the country twice. He came back both times without a majority. The 29 November vote will say whether the marches in 50 cities were a demand for his government, or a demand that whoever forms the next one stop a pensioner from being priced out of a flat.