Spain's housing decrees fall, and the marches keep the keys in the air

Congress rejected both of Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's emergency housing decrees on Friday, and on Saturday tens of thousands of people marched in more than 50 Spanish cities, rattling keys under the slogan "Right to a roof."

The first decree, which would have barred evictions of vulnerable tenants, capped rent rises at 2 percent, extended expiring leases and offered tax relief to landlords who rent at regulated prices, fell by 178 votes to 172. The second, which would have made leases renew automatically and required an owner to pay a tenant 12 months of rent to break the contract, fell by 184 to 166. The lower house has 350 seats. Sánchez's Socialist-Sumar coalition does not have a majority, and it lost both texts when Junts, the right-wing Catalan party, refused to back them.

Miriam Nogueras of Junts said the decrees would tighten the market and push prices up. The Popular Party and Vox voted against. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the Popular Party leader, told Sánchez to call an election. Health minister Mónica García said the right had voted for what she called a feudal economy. Sánchez's office has said he will announce on Monday whether he dissolves parliament. A dissolution would put a general election on 29 November, according to reporting in El Diario. The ordinary end of the term is July 2027.

The rent numbers behind the marches

Average rent in Spain has nearly doubled in ten years. The price per square metre rose from 8.20 euros in 2016 to 15.1 euros in 2026. That national figure hides sharper rises in Madrid and Barcelona, which is where the marches were largest. The trigger named by organisers was the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, 87, from a Madrid flat she had lived in for 70 years. An investment fund bought the building and raised the rent by more than 200 percent, to about 1,880 dollars a month. She has since gone back into the flat. The case is one household. It is the case the tenants' unions used to start a month of street protest.

Saturday's Madrid march drew four columns from the edges of the centre to Gran Vía and on toward Cibeles. The government delegation counted 70,000. The Tenants' Union counted 500,000. Both figures are claims. The gap between them is the usual one in a Spanish street count, and it is wide enough that neither number should be printed as fact. What is not in dispute is the route, the keys, and the day: the march had been called before the vote, and it went ahead as a response to the vote.

Where the protests turned rough

In Valencia, about 30 people entered the City of Arts and Sciences, and police reported nine officers hurt and five arrests. Barcelona's march was set for Monday. The weekend action was not a single rally. It was a set of city marches, called by tenants' groups, that acquired a parliamentary defeat in the middle of the plan.

Nando de Angulo, 26, told Reuters at the Madrid march that the vote showed people having to adapt to parties, not parties to people. Valeria Racu, speaking for the Tenants' Union, treated the defeat as proof that the decrees had to be replaced by a stronger text, not abandoned. Sociologist Marta Soler Gallart, at the University of Barcelona, made a different point: the decrees did not touch the long shortage of built housing, only the terms of existing leases. A 2 percent cap and an automatic renewal change the contract. They do not add a flat.

What Monday decides

Sánchez can dissolve the Cortes or he can try to rebuild a majority for a third text. Junts has said it will not sign the two that failed. The Popular Party wants an election. A November vote would be fought on a rent figure, 8.20 euros to 15.1, that neither decree managed to put into law. Until Monday's announcement, the legal position is the one Friday produced: both texts are dead, evictions of the kind that removed Abascal remain lawful, and the rent cap of 2 percent does not exist.