Fifteen years after the indignados occupied the Puerta del Sol, Madrid’s central plaza is once again the locus of a mass movement that has brought Spain to a political impasse. How are we back here again? The immediate trigger was the eviction of an elderly tenant. Maricarmen Abascal, who had occupied her rent-capped apartment in central Madrid since 1956, was expelled from her home on 23 September after the investment fund Urbagestión acquired the property and exploited a legal loophole to quintuple her rent. Maricarmen’s age and vulnerability – the 87-year-old was removed on a hospital bed and has since died – made it a particularly egregious breach of the moral economy. The case struck a nerve, prompting a political storm; the government has now announced a snap election. As protests spread nationwide, the encampment at Puerta del Sol consolidated under the leadership of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, Madrid’s tenant union. Media outlets are reporting on the motions passed at the open-air general assembly. One decision has been of particular public interest: a general strike for the right to housing, announced for 11 November, a few weeks before the election.

The political elite faces a reckoning. At the outset of the current parliamentary term in 2023, the progressive coalition headed by Sánchez’s centre-left Socialist Party (PSOE) placed housing at the top of the agenda. The promises were ambitious: the provision of mass social housing, the imposition of rent controls, the reassertion of the public interest against rentier logics. Yet these commitments yielded little. This was partly due to the obstruction of the right, both in parliament and in the regional governments under its control. But a share of the blame lies in the ambivalence of the Socialist Party itself, whose ministers have repeatedly expressed discomfort with what they regard as excessive regulation of housing. The junior coalition partner Sumar, a nebulous alliance of progressive parties, has proven feeble in holding the Socialists to account. They are now also a target of the protests, who charge the entire governing alliance of complicity with the rentiers. Amid the fury in the streets, Sumar’s cabinet members hastened to pressure the Socialist housing minister, Isabel Rodríguez – herself a landlord who owns multiple properties – to approve emergency measures to block evictions and institute permanent rolling contracts, both key demands of the tenant unions. Last Friday, both measures were struck down in parliament, to the anger of the masses gathered outside.

That a recalcitrant right-wing opposition – comprising the conservative People’s Party (PP) and the far-right Vox – would block the measures was entirely predictable. What was less so was that the deciding vote would be cast by an ally of the government: the centre-right Junts, party of the Catalan-nationalist bourgeoisie. The vote revealed a peculiarity of the Spanish conjuncture. Though the right-wing bloc is the largest in parliament, it is divided along nationalist lines, fractures the government has exploited – drawing support from the Catalan right to keep the Spanish unionist right out of power. It was always an unstable arrangement, premised on nation trumping class. On the housing question, the plurinational right voted in alignment with its shared interests (Junts has the largest proportion of landlords in parliament).

The Spanish right now enjoys a comfortable lead in the polls, which point to a PP–Vox coalition if elections were held tomorrow. But the wind is blowing in an uncomfortable direction for them. Over the past week, public opinion has swung massively in favour of regulating house prices, even among a slim majority of right-wing voters. In a matter of days, the protests have shifted the national conversation away from the right’s preferred talking points of crime and migration, overwriting a summer of hysteria around the border crisis in Ceuta. They have also deflected attention from the corruption scandals afflicting PSOE: only last June, a former minister in Sánchez’s cabinet was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison for influence-peddling related to substandard Covid-19 face masks. Ever the survivor, Sánchez has seized the moment with a characteristically audacious move. He has framed the election on 29 November as a plebiscite on the housing question, shifting the blame for it onto the right and boldly appealing to the electorate to ‘subdue the elites’, hoping to ride the wave of unrest that is also aimed against him. 

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Housing has been a political flashpoint in Spain ever since a giant real estate bubble crashed the economy between 2007–14. The circumstances in many ways paralleled those that led to the Great Recession: financial liberalization; easy credit supercharged by cross-border flows; homeowners mortgaged to the hilt; skyrocketing house prices stoked by reckless speculation. What stood out in the Spanish case was the extent to which growth and employment came to depend on a hypertrophied construction sector, rendering broad sections of the economy highly exposed to the inevitable crash. In the 2000s, as rapid population growth and the arrival of Eurozone capital accelerated house-price increases, Spain built more homes than the UK, Italy and Germany combined. At the peak of the boom in 2006, when annual housing construction reached 700,000 units, reports from the property sector estimated that ‘structural demand’ – that is, demand for housing to live in – was only 400,000 homes a year. The resulting surplus, built on a purely self-referential, speculative demand, was the substance of the bubble. When household indebtedness hit its ceiling in 2007 and transactions slowed, it burst: prices stagnated and then plummeted. Speculative developers ceased building, grinding the engine of the economy to a halt and releasing shockwaves of job destruction. At the height of the crisis in 2013, unemployment reached a historic high of 26 per cent (56 per cent among the young). Developers, banks and the state rushed to expel families who could not meet rent or mortgage payments. Between 2008 and 2015 there were roughly half a million evictions, half of them foreclosures. The bitter irony was that hundreds of thousands lost their homes because there were hundreds of thousands of homes too many.

In a series of costly bailouts, the state absorbed the losses of the property-financial complex, bringing it to the edge of insolvency. Successive administrations – of both the PSOE and the PP – passed the cost to the masses, inflicting punitive austerity under the watchful eye of Europe’s fiscal hawks. The usual sanctimony about belt-tightening and living beyond one’s means fell flat. Political parties were plagued by relentless corruption scandals, the majority involving dealings with developers and builders no less. Bankers, meanwhile, flaunted their rapacity by paying themselves obscene bonuses as their banks were being nationalized, leaving the state to foot the bill.

The ensuing crisis of legitimacy set the scene for the rise of the indignados, or the 15-M movement as it is more often referred to in Spain. On 15 May 2011, a series of mass protests descended on city squares, taking aim at austerity measures and the oligarchic bent of the political system. The movement radiated out from Puerta del Sol, where protesters emulated the camp then ongoing in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Though the social composition of the protest was broad, it was led by downwardly mobile middle-class youths, many of whom became politicized for the first time at the movement’s assemblies. The memorable yellow T-shirts of the activist group Juventud Sin Futuro captured the feeling with a defiant slogan: ‘no home, no job, no pension, no fear’. Eventually, the 15-M’s occupations dispersed into neighbourhood councils, where a wave of radicalized youngsters flooded into a myriad of militant groups. A cycle of mass unrest and civil disobedience followed. The most prominent organization was the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH), whose activists acted as the shock troops of the anti-austerity movement. Sabotaging eviction procedures was their staple practice: they confronted bailiffs and their riot police escorts on arrival, barricaded themselves with the families being expelled, occupied repossessed homes, or squatted entire tower blocks to provide accommodation for the dispossessed. The extra-parliamentary struggles of these years proved extremely successful in repoliticizing questions previously regarded as shameful personal failures – unemployment, debt, eviction – turning them into vectors of mass resistance.

Yet they were much less successful in bringing the state to heel. Ironically, the first major electoral outcome of the 15-M protests was a crushing landslide for the right in November 2011. Though the movement had wide public support, its injunction to abstain from voting for the neoliberal uniparty – ‘PPSOE’ – was followed more by the left than the right. PSOE’s vote collapsed while PP’s remained stable, translating into an absolute parliamentary majority for the neoliberal conservatives of Mariano Rajoy, who proceeded to further slash public spending, introduce a draconian labour market reform, and sell off the real estate assets acquired from the banks to global corporate landlords. With its dominance in parliament, the new administration was able to invoke the support of a ‘silent majority’ to rule by decree while cracking down on protest. At the behest of its Interior Minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz – an ultra-Catholic in the habit of praying in Franco’s mausoleum – the government introduced the notorious ‘Gag Law’ tailored to the new social movements, which included punitively high fines for blocking evictions. Meanwhile, in a perfect visual metaphor for the dissociation of the elite from the masses, parliament was fenced off from the public and fortified with a permanent detachment of riot police.

After years of being stonewalled, street-fighting fatigue began to set in around 2014. The gigantic March for Dignity that year – demanding ‘bread, work and a roof’ and culminating in riots in Madrid – was the final flashpoint of this insurrectionary cycle. Seeing the tide turning, activists previously committed to the extra-parliamentary ethos of the 15-M began to form political parties, and probe strategic entry points into the state. One approach was to capitalize on the anti-establishment mood to mount a broad, left-populist offensive aimed at capturing state power ‘from above’; the path taken by Podemos, founded in 2014 with the priority of ‘storming the heavens’ in a general election. Another was the formation of electoral coalitions between urban activists and pre-existing left-wing parties to wrest state power at the local level; a route explored by the multitude of municipalist platforms that in 2015 won office in the country’s largest cities, including Cádiz, Santiago, Zaragoza, Valencia, Madrid and of course, Barcelona, where PAH’s charismatic spokeswoman, Ada Colau, was elected mayor with housing at the top of her agenda.

Both strategies ran into the trouble of operating in the inhospitable terrain of the state. Barcelona’s Right to Housing Plan of 2016 was fairly successful in blocking evictions and expanding the social housing stock through a combination of public construction, aggressive acquisition campaigns and the imposition of social housing quotas on developers. But this was the most advanced expression of a municipalist strategy that faced severe challenges from the start. Local reformers ran up against the austerity imposed by the central government; encountered entrenched resistance at all levels of the state bureaucracy; and were forced to water down their policy proposals to navigate the political fragmentation of local councils and/or of their own electoral alliances. Frustration set in among activists and voters as the grinding pace of reform failed to live up to the revolutionary rhetoric. Most of the administrations in the ‘cities of change’ proved short-lived, voted out of office in 2019. Barcelona followed suit in 2023.

Podemos faced a different set of challenges. Upon its founding, the party quickly drew in hundreds of thousands, swelling new branches in what promised to be a participatory party-movement. However, the leadership – a group of academics sceptical of the potential of grassroots activism – quickly centralized power and reduced internal democracy to a plebiscitary exercise in which the membership merely ratified decisions handed down from above. Such behaviour followed logically from a left-populist strategy that soon became familiar in Europe and North America, one that revolved around charismatic leadership and disciplined media messaging. This strategy did not require a vibrant, independent grassroots layer, but rather the subordination of the whole organization to an ‘electoral war machine’ commanded from the top. The party’s branches withered away as its members were largely reduced to passive clicktivists. What the party gained in short-term agility from this strategy, it lost in long-term resilience: without organized cadres, it became vulnerable to media attacks and personality-driven factionalism.

Meanwhile, Podemos’s appeal waned as its electoral assaults on the central state were successively repealed. However, in the general elections of 2019 it was able to clinch enough seats to enter coalition with a reluctant PSOE, locking both parties into a fraught partnership. Podemos’s main legislative achievement was the Housing Law of 2023, which introduced a nationwide framework for rent controls. Passed as the municipalist wave died out, it seemed to confirm that the strategic entry point into the state was ‘from above’. Yet the gap between law and practice became apparent soon enough. In control of most regional administrations, the People’s Party and their far-right allies Vox have simply refused to implement it. To this day, the law is only in force in Catalonia and in areas of the Basque Country. The bill also left a glaring loophole around short-term tourist rentals, letting the hollowing out of cities through platforms like Airbnb continue unabated.

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That rent controls have become a burning issue in a society in which 73.3 per cent of households are owner-occupiers reflects the permutations of the Spanish housing system since the crash. When the bubble burst, the state nationalized a huge pool of ‘toxic assets’. This devalued property could have been used to create a public housing system, badly needed at a time of rampant evictions. Instead, starting in 2013, the state opted to sell them off at fire-sale prices to investment funds. Blackstone became the country’s biggest landlord. In order to relaunch the property market as quickly as possible the state incentivized the business of the ‘mega-landlords’ with tax advantages and tailored regulations, which also benefited a broader swathe of middle-class landlords. Meanwhile, the share of the tenant population has increased for the first time since the 1950s (+7 per cent of households since 2011). Those homeowners expelled from their homes during the crisis returned to the market as tenants. There, they were joined by a new generation excluded from the mortgage market, more strictly regulated in the wake of the crisis. Credit restrictions have suppressed the leveraged purchases of the 2000s, which allowed many to ride the bubble by borrowing against the rising value of their homes or ‘flip’ them for profit.

Meanwhile, residential accumulation has reoriented itself around squeezing the growing captive market of tenants or, failing that, the exploitation of tourist rentals. Economically, the new housing regime is more stable than the previous one. Rents rise more or less in line with wages, devouring the disposable income of tenants, but without the debt-fuelled speculative excesses of the bubble. Politically, however, the present arrangement is far more unstable and more prone to social explosions, owing to the greater prominence of rent tenure, where the conflict between the residential and rent-bearing functions of housing is more transparent than in a mass market of ‘petty-rentier’ speculative homeowners.

Since 2017, Spain has witnessed the emergence of militant tenant unions, which have gained prominence for defeating Blackstone in court and for employing an old tactic of working-class struggle: the rent strike. Although tenants remain a small minority (17 per cent of households), they are demonstrating a capacity to punch far above their weight politically, as their demands mobilize broader strata around the right to housing. A rentier bloc has been taking shape in opposition, headed by large investment funds but sustained by a substantial layer of middle-class landlords, who act as its electoral base. The political frontier of this bloc is difficult to determine, but it clearly runs through the heart of the coalition government. This has been demonstrated by successive PSOE ministers, whose reluctance to regulate rents or openly support the right to housing has repeatedly given them away. With Podemos diminished, since 2023 the Socialists have governed alongside its more cooperative successor, Sumar; an entente cordiale that has failed to bear fruit on housing matters. (Perhaps for this reason Sumar is now floating Colau, former mayor of Barcelona, as a presidential candidate.)

As the left-populist wave recedes, a younger generation of activists is coming to terms with the limits of the electoral experiments of the previous decade – as well as the horizontalism that immediately preceded them. In Puerta del Sol today, formal similarities with 15-M conceal differences of substance. The encampment is once again a plural space – it is populated by three dozen organizations – where successive generations converge and where previously apolitical youngsters are acquiring a new radical consciousness. But in the assemblies there is less blue-sky philosophizing and more strategic discussion; less spontaneity and more coordination of an agreed calendar of escalation. The festive mood of the first iteration has given way to one of discipline, reflecting the maturing of a radical civil society with organizational memory and political experience. The initiative for a general strike came from the Sindicato de Inquilinas; the anarcho-syndicalist unions, which have a presence in the square, promptly joined. The major trade unions – otherwise docile and cooperative with the government – have followed suit. In recent days, the Sindicato has gradually shifted its activity away from the square toward its ‘nodes’ or neighbourhood councils, in preparation for the strike. The vacuum has been increasingly filled by the Movimiento Socialista, a Marxist youth movement highly sceptical of reformist politics, upon which a number of political currents have converged in recent years.

If Sánchez pulls off a comeback in the November election and manages to cobble together another progressive coalition, the balance of parliamentary forces will likely resemble that of today, as will the pace and scale of reform – which is increasingly intolerable to swathes of the population. But if the election plays out as it did almost fifteen years ago, and the right wins a comfortable majority, we can expect a replay of brutal austerity and police crackdown. Only this time, a government more overt in its fascist sympathies will have to face down a hardened and more disciplined extra-parliamentary left – one that will have to come to terms, sooner or later, with how to influence the state and find a fresh synthesis of the dialectic between revolution and reform. Whether this takes the form of new political vehicles contesting state power directly, or of an antagonistic yet tacit division of labour with reformist forces, remains a critical question.

Read on: Ekaitz Cancel & Pedro M. Rey-Araújo, ‘Lessons of the Podemos Experiment’, NLR 138.

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