Spain's parliament kills the eviction freeze, and tens of thousands march

Spain's parliament voted down the government's emergency housing package on Friday, and on Saturday tens of thousands of people marched in Madrid and in about 50 other cities. The two decrees, from Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's minority coalition, would have paused evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030. They also carried tax breaks for landlords who cut rents, a temporary bar on purchases by investment funds, and new rules and taxes on short-term tourist lets. None of that is law.

The votes fell because Junts, the right-wing Catalan separatist party that sometimes keeps Sánchez in office, turned against the text hours before the sitting. Junts said the bill as written would reduce the supply of rental housing and push prices up, and it asked for the legislation to be withdrawn and rewritten. In the chamber it voted with the opposition Popular Party and with Vox. Housing minister Isabel Rodríguez had told parliament the draft already contained about 90 percent of what Junts had asked for. The appeal did not move the votes.

The trigger, more than a week earlier, was the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, an 87-year-old woman, from the Madrid home she had lived in for 70 years. Protesters pitched tents in Puerta del Sol and stayed after the eviction was reversed. Saturday's marches were the street answer to Friday's vote. Organisers called for a general strike and for a housing rewrite. AFP and Reuters described the crowds as tens of thousands across the country. A speaker identified as Racu told one rally that politics was returning to the street.

The parliamentary arithmetic is the part that decides what happens next. Sánchez does not have a majority. Junts is not in the coalition, but the coalition cannot pass contested bills without it or without some other small party. A housing text that loses Junts, the Popular Party and Vox at once has no second path in this chamber. Calls for an early election, already made after the vote, follow from that. They are not the same as an election. Sánchez can try a redrafted bill and offer Junts the changes it named, a harder cap on what the text does to small landlords. He can also wait and govern on decrees that do not need this vote. The eviction freeze, as written, is gone.

The content of the fallen package is worth keeping straight, because the protests are about the rent crisis and the vote was about a specific list. A suspension of evictions for vulnerable tenants through 2030 would have frozen one end of the market, the end where an 87-year-old loses a flat, without building a single new home. Tax breaks for landlords who lower rents were the supply-side offer. The bar on fund purchases, denounced by critics as a strike at vulture funds, was aimed at concentrated ownership. Tourist-let taxes were aimed at the stock that leaves the long-term market in cities like Barcelona and central Madrid. Junts' objection was that the sum of those rules would make owners withdraw flats. The government said the objection had already been met on nine tenths of the text. Both claims can be true of different clauses. The chamber did not split them. It rejected the lot.

Abascal's case is now doing two kinds of work. Her eviction was reversed, so the individual remedy the protests demanded has already happened. The tents in Puerta del Sol did not come down. Saturday's marches treated the reversed eviction as proof that pressure works on a single file, and the parliamentary defeat as proof that pressure has not yet changed the law. That is a harder demand. A government that cannot pass its own housing decree cannot meet it by administrative order alone.

What Friday settled is narrow and clear. The eviction pause until 2030 is not in force. The fund ban is not in force. The tourist-let package is not in force. Junts has said it wants a redraft. The crowds in Madrid and in the other cities have said they want the original promise. Sánchez is between those two sentences, without the votes to choose either one cleanly.