Sánchez dissolves parliament and sets a general election for 29 November

Pedro Sánchez told the country on Monday that he had called a general election for Sunday, 29 November. In an institutional statement from La Moncloa, he said he had informed the king and convened an extraordinary Council of Ministers that morning to dissolve the Cortes Generales.

The decree is due in the Official State Gazette on Tuesday, 6 October. Dissolution takes effect with that publication. Both chambers are scheduled to sit again on 23 December, after the vote. The election was not due until the summer of 2027.

The trigger was Friday's defeat of two housing decree-laws. Congress rejected the first by 178 votes to 172 and the second by 184 to 166. Junts, the Catalan party that had kept Sánchez's minority alive on other votes, sided with the Popular Party and Vox. Sánchez had written on social media the day before that he would not withdraw the texts, and that the vote would define lawmakers for a generation. It defined the length of the parliament instead.

The decrees were written after the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, 87, from the Madrid flat she had lived in since 1956, and after marches in the capital and about 50 other cities. The first text suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, extended rental contracts due to expire before the end of 2028 by two years, raised taxes on tourist lets, and restricted purchases by funds the government calls vulture funds. It also carried tax relief for tenants and loans for first-time buyers. The second provided for automatic renewal of rental contracts. The Basque Nationalist Party had already opposed that second text on Friday, which is why it fell by a wider margin.

Average rent in Spain has moved from 8.20 euros a square metre in 2016 to 15.1 euros in 2026. That doubling is the number the marches have been organised around. Sánchez's statement on Monday framed the election as a request for a broader progressive majority able to pass the reforms a minority parliament has just blocked. He did not name a coalition partner for the next term.

Dissolution does not freeze the housing file. The Local reported on Monday that the government intends to re-approve both decrees at Tuesday's cabinet. With parliament dissolved, ratification moves to the permanent deputation, the standing committee that sits while the chambers are closed. That committee must vote within 31 days. The second decree is the harder of the two, because the PNV already voted against it. Any rights created this way can be repealed by the next Cortes. A PP-Vox majority would be expected to do that. A thin left majority might not be able to defend them either.

Spanish law lets a prime minister propose dissolution at any time, provided no confidence motion is in train, no state of emergency is in force, and a year has passed since the last dissolution. All three conditions were met. The 29 November date fits the statutory campaign calendar once the decree is published on Tuesday.

The campaign will now run on a single bill that parliament has already rejected. Sánchez is asking voters to return the majority that Friday's vote showed he does not have. The Popular Party and Vox will argue that the decrees were an attempt to campaign from the cabinet. Junts, having voted them down, has to decide whether it wants a seat in the next negotiation or a record as the party that forced the poll.