Sánchez calls a 29 November election after Congress kills both housing decrees

Pedro Sánchez has called a Spanish general election for 29 November after Congress rejected both of his government's emergency housing decrees on Friday. The first decree fell by 178 votes to 172. The second fell by 184 to 166. The Catalan party Junts voted against both, which was enough to kill a package the minority government had treated as a test of its remaining majority.

The decrees were the government's answer to street protests that followed the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, 87, from the Madrid flat she had lived in since 1956. The Council of Ministers approved the texts on Tuesday 29 September. Sánchez wrote on X that he would not withdraw them and that the vote would define lawmakers for a generation. Deputy Prime Minister Yolanda Díaz told Cadena SER she had spoken with him and would not rule out an early election.

The first decree extended protection against eviction for vulnerable tenants without another home until the end of 2030. It let current rental contracts that were paid up run on for two years. It froze, until 2028, rents above the state reference index. The package also tightened rules on seasonal lets and room rentals, raised tax on tourist flats, and blocked some purchases by funds the government called vulture funds until 2028. Small landlords who let at affordable rents kept incentives. Tenants were offered new deductions. First-time buyers were offered interest-free loans of up to 50,000 euros. A reduced VAT rate was attached to protected housing.

Junts announced late on Thursday that it would oppose both texts. The party defends landlord rights and has sat outside the government's reliable bloc on housing even when it has traded votes on other bills. The People's Party and Vox were already against the decrees. With Junts added, the arithmetic flipped. A surprise appearance by Sánchez in the chamber, in which he told deputies to think of the people and said history would judge them, did not move the count.

El País reported before the vote that senior Socialists, cabinet ministers and regional party leaders favoured an early election if both decrees failed, and that 29 November was the date under discussion. Some wanted an announcement the same day. Others wanted Sánchez to watch weekend demonstrations first and decide on Monday, ahead of a PSOE executive meeting. By Monday the call was public. Wikipedia's current-events log and Spain in English both recorded the 29 November date after the Guardian's Europe live coverage.

The constitutional clock is short and fixed. A prime minister dissolves the Cortes, the King signs the decree, and the electoral board sets the campaign inside a window of 54 days from dissolution to polling day. A 29 November ballot implies a dissolution in the first days of October. Municipalities then have to open electoral rolls, parties have to file lists, and the official campaign runs for 15 days. Housing would be the government's chosen subject. It is also the subject on which Junts, the party whose votes have kept this legislature alive on other questions, just refused him.

The decrees themselves are dead. Rejection of a real decreto-ley means the text does not become law and the government cannot reissue the same emergency text in the same terms without a change of circumstance. Any tenant protection that depended on the 2030 extension, the two-year contract rollover or the freeze above the reference index stays where the existing housing law left it. Funds that the decree would have barred from purchases until 2028 are not barred by this route. That is the immediate legal result, separate from the campaign.

Sánchez has governed since 2018 and won the July 2023 election without a majority, assembling investiture votes from Sumar, Basque and Catalan parties, including an amnesty bargain with Junts. Housing is the issue that split that bargain in public. Junts voters in Catalonia include landlords who treat rent control as a Madrid imposition. PSOE voters in large cities include tenants who treat the Abascal eviction as proof the existing law failed. An election on 29 November forces both groups onto the same ballot.

The open fact for the next seven weeks is whether the Socialists can turn a lost decree into a list of votes, or whether the parties that killed the decrees can turn the same defeat into a change of government. The numbers that are already fixed are the two congressional tallies, 178-172 and 184-166, and the date.