The mobilisations of recent days have once again brought the housing crisis to the centre of political life and public debate in Spain. The eviction of Maricarmen Abascal, and the response it sparked, made it impossible for the Government to continue dealing with the issue as it had done until now. Within a matter of days, it approved two royal decree-laws introducing changes in areas that, only weeks earlier, had been far from central to its agenda. The first addresses, among other matters, certain speculative property transactions, temporary and room rentals, some forms of eviction, and a number of tax and affordable housing measures. The second makes substantial changes to the rules governing extensions of standard residential tenancy agreements. Both decrees are due to be put to a vote in Congress today.
There can be little doubt that it was popular mobilisation that forced the Government to act, and to act quickly. For years, rents have been allowed to consume an ever larger share of workers’ wages. Temporary tenancy agreements have frequently been used to bypass the protections that apply to standard residential leases. Tourist accommodation has continued to spread through areas already under enormous housing pressure. Housing itself has remained one of the main fields for investment, speculation and rent extraction. Only now, when the political cost of inaction has risen, are emergency measures being introduced — and only after access to housing has deteriorated to levels that are increasingly unsustainable.
Royal Decree-Law 26/2026 introduces, among other provisions, temporary restrictions on certain property purchases until the end of 2028, regulates temporary housing contracts, establishes new rules concerning large property owners, and amends a number of tax and procedural provisions. Royal Decree-Law 27/2026 provides that, once the minimum five-year tenancy period has expired — seven years where the landlord is a legal entity — the agreement may be extended again for a further period of the same length. It also establishes compensation in certain cases where the landlord decides not to renew the tenancy.
These changes are themselves a product of mobilisation. The question, however, is not only what they change, but also what they leave untouched. Despite the advances they contain, the underlying problem remains the same: housing continues to be treated as a commodity, a source of rent and a privileged sphere for the accumulation of capital. Those who need a home in order to live still come up against those who are able to hold housing as property, investment or a financial asset. The State may intervene in some of the terms of this relationship, restrict certain practices, impose obligations and mitigate some of its worst effects, but it does not challenge the economic relations that allow a basic human need to remain one of the most profitable areas of business.
That contradiction runs through the measures themselves. The Government speaks of fighting speculation and strengthening the social function of housing, while continuing to rely on private capital as a central component of public housing policy. One of the stated purposes of the Social Impact Housing Fund created under the first decree is to attract private investment, while other measures use public guarantees, incentives and financing to encourage the participation of private developers and operators. This is therefore not a policy aimed at steadily reducing the role of the market in access to housing. It is a policy designed to contain some of the market’s consequences while ensuring that the market itself continues to operate.
As with so many measures introduced by the social-democratic coalition Government, public resources are being used to absorb part of the risk required to keep private investment profitable and attractive, while ownership, commercial exploitation and returns remain largely in private hands. The same applies to the changes affecting SOCIMIs, Spain’s listed real-estate investment companies. Tax rules are amended, certain practices are penalised and incentives tied to affordable housing are introduced, but the use of housing by major investment companies as a source of profit remains untouched. The political and parliamentary debate is therefore centred on how this economic activity should be regulated, rather than on whether a basic need should remain a field for financial capital in the first place.
Even the measures intended to expand the public housing stock reveal the scale of decades of failed policy. The expansion of CASA 47, the transfer of certain properties and the protection of parts of the public housing stock may strengthen the State’s capacity to intervene, but they start from a position in which Spain has an exceptionally small public housing sector in relation to existing needs. This is the cumulative result of decades in which subsidised housing was allowed to end up on the private market, publicly owned housing was reduced, and the private market was effectively left to determine where homes were built, how much it cost to live in them and who could afford them.
The temporary character of many of these measures is equally revealing. Restrictions on certain property transactions have an expiry date, as do some extraordinary rent controls and some protections against eviction. Yet the problem they are meant to address is neither exceptional nor temporary. We are not dealing with a temporary distortion of the housing market that will simply disappear in 2027, 2028 or 2030. We are dealing with a particular structure of ownership, a particular model of land use, a historic shortage of public housing, the overwhelming presence of private capital and an increasingly unsustainable gap between wages and housing costs.
For this reason, the housing question cannot be separated from the wage question. Every additional hundred euros spent on rent is a hundred euros no longer available to meet other needs. Part of the worker’s wage is thereby transferred directly to the property owner in the form of rent. The worsening of access to housing is therefore also a deterioration in real wages, even if it does not appear on the payslip and is not negotiated by workplace committees.
This connection is precisely why the current housing mobilisations cannot be viewed in isolation from the labour disputes taking place across different sectors throughout the country. The people who cannot afford their rent are often the same people forced to work schedules incompatible with family life, subjected to insecure or temporary employment, or dependent on public services undergoing continual deterioration. These problems appear fragmented because the economic and political life of the working class is itself fragmented. But their different forms rest on the same material foundations.
Today’s parliamentary vote adds another important dimension. On the basis of the positions already announced by the different parliamentary groups, both decrees are likely to be defeated, or at most only one may pass. This would hardly be unprecedented. In April, Congress rejected Royal Decree-Law 8/2026 — which included an extraordinary extension of tenancy agreements — with the votes of the PP, Vox and Junts. The Government therefore knew the parliamentary arithmetic in advance and was fully aware that neither decree was guaranteed to pass.
Despite this, the PSOE chose to divide the measures into two separate decrees, allowing each parliamentary group to support what it found acceptable and reject what affected the interests of its social base. Sumar accepted this approach. It is no coincidence that the decree facing the greatest opposition is the one dealing with tenancy extensions, and therefore the one that most directly affects the stability of people living in rented accommodation. If the vote produces the expected result, it will not be enough for the Government to place all responsibility elsewhere. The balance of forces in Parliament was known beforehand, not only for this vote but for the entire legislature. Anyone who adopts a political manoeuvre or strategy in full knowledge that it may fail, while presenting it as the answer to a problem affecting millions of people, must also bear responsibility for the consequences of that failure.
That does not, of course, absolve those who vote against the measures. The PP and Vox have announced their opposition, openly defending the interests of big capital. Vox has gone further, attempting to blame the housing crisis on immigration through arguments that are as reactionary as they are absurd.
Junts, for its part, has announced that it will oppose both decrees, while the PNV will support the first and reject the one concerning tenancy extensions. Both have once again invoked the figure of the “small landlord”, as though greater security for tenants threatened the livelihood of “ordinary” families rather than restricting the freedom of landlords to recover a property, raise the rent or replace a tenant whenever they choose. Behind the blackmail of the “small landlord” lies the defence of the right to continue drawing income from another person’s need for housing. In practice, it means defending the interests of property owners as a whole, and above all those of the largest owners.
The events of recent days show that the limits of what is presented as politically possible are not fixed. When social conflict intensifies, measures that had previously been dismissed on economic, legal or political grounds can suddenly be adopted with remarkable speed. This does not mean that every mobilisation automatically achieves its objectives, nor that these decrees transform the relations at the root of the housing crisis. But it does show that the balance of forces matters, and that government action is shaped not only by programmes and parliamentary negotiations, but also by the pressure exerted from outside Parliament.
It is in this context that the debate over a general strike has returned. We do not believe that a general strike should be reduced to a ritual slogan, nor do we believe that the growing number of sectoral strikes and social mobilisations means that the necessary conditions already exist. A general strike is not simply a larger demonstration, nor a political protest accompanied by a number of work stoppages. Its strength lies in the organised capacity of broad sections of the working class to bring production and services to a halt.
Today, we have scattered struggles, some of them highly significant, alongside widespread discontent affecting very different sections of the working class. The question is how to prevent each of these struggles from remaining confined to its own separate field. Housing and working conditions must be discussed together in the workplaces. Every strike should leave behind more organisation than existed before it began. Workers themselves must become active protagonists of these struggles rather than passive recipients of calls to action decided elsewhere. And forms of coordination must be built that can outlast any single mobilisation.
None of this can be built simply by announcing a date. But neither can the absence of these conditions today be used as an excuse to postpone the question indefinitely. Housing costs, declining purchasing power, the impoverishment of broad layers of the working class and the proliferation of labour disputes all make it necessary to ask how we can move from fragmented and partial responses towards a general capacity for working-class intervention. A general strike would make sense only as part of such a process: when it can express an already existing force rather than attempt to substitute for one that has yet to be built.
Even if both decrees were ratified, they would not solve the housing crisis. They impose certain limits, establish some protections and curb specific abuses, but they do so within a housing market whose foundations remain intact. At the same time, they preserve mechanisms designed to attract and sustain private investment, while measures presented as exceptional and temporary are used to address problems that are neither exceptional nor temporary.
The events of recent days once again show that when discontent ceases to be experienced as an individual problem and becomes collective struggle, the boundaries of what is politically possible also begin to shift. The question now is how much of this strength will remain once the media attention has faded, and whether it can be carried into the workplaces, connected with other struggles and turned into lasting organisation.
The PCTE is committed to carrying this work forward with all its strength. It is time to build a powerful working-class opposition to capital and its governments.
Political Bureau of PCTE
October 2nd, 2026