Sánchez calls a Spanish election for 29 November after housing decrees fail

Pedro Sánchez has called a Spanish general election for 29 November, more than half a year before the latest legal date. The prime minister announced the vote in a televised address on Monday, 5 October, after parliament rejected two decree laws meant to protect tenants. Spain was not due to go to the polls until the summer of 2027 at the latest. Sánchez has been prime minister since June 2018. His Socialist party finished second in 2023 and has governed without a majority, relying on Sumar and on Catalan and Basque nationalist votes.

The trigger is housing. On Friday, lawmakers threw out two decree laws drawn up after protests over the eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, 87, from a Madrid flat she had lived in since 1956. She was removed on 23 September. A legal gap let her landlord lift the rent from €500 a month to €2,650. The figure was later cut to €1,650, still about €300 above her monthly pension. The case moved from one flat in the capital to street protests in several cities.

The first decree would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, extended rental leases due to expire before 2028 by two years, raised taxes on tourist apartments, and restricted purchases of homes by funds the government calls vulture funds. The second decree would have renewed rental contracts automatically. Both needed parliamentary approval to stay in force. Both failed.

Sánchez said he needed a broader progressive majority that could overcome what he called the resistance of the elites. He also said the government had made mistakes and had not done everything it set out to do, and he named inequality, public services and access to housing as open problems. He framed the election as a way to renew and widen support for that programme.

Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the People's Party, said Spaniards would at last be able to decide. He cast the vote as a choice between decline and change, and between corruption and change. Juan Bravo, also of the People's Party, said housing does not get cheaper with decrees. It gets cheaper, he said, with more homes. That line is the opposition's whole argument in one sentence: supply, not rent controls.

Most published polls put the People's Party near 34 percent and the Socialists near 26 percent. On those numbers Feijóo would be the largest party and would still need Vox, or some other partner, to form a government. Sánchez has survived worse arithmetic before. He has also spent the summer under pressure from corruption cases around the Socialist party and from the handling of crossings at Ceuta. Housing is the ground he has chosen. It is also the ground where his decrees just lost.

The calendar is short. A 29 November vote leaves little time to rewrite the failed decrees as ordinary bills. It also leaves the rental market in the state it was in before Friday: no automatic renewal, no eviction freeze to 2030, and no new tax on tourist flats from these decrees. Tenants who hoped the Abascal case would produce a statute now have an election instead.

Spain's housing argument is not abstract. In Madrid and Barcelona, tourist lets and fund purchases have been blamed for pushing long-term rents up. The Abascal numbers make the gap concrete. A pension that could cover €500 cannot cover €1,650. A decree that dies in parliament does not change that gap. A new Congress might. It might also refuse the same text.

The People's Party's offer is more building. The Socialists' offer is a wider majority for tenant rules they could not pass with the current one. Vox has not been the author of either decree. It is, on current polls, the party that could decide whether Feijóo governs. That is the arithmetic Sánchez is asking voters to break, or to confirm, on 29 November.