Latest / Pollar Sounds / A decree with her name on it, and nothing in it for her

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A decree with her name on it, and nothing in it for her · Pollar Sounds

0:15
Maricarmen Abascal.
0:17
That's the sound of her being forced out of her own flat on a stretcher.
0:21
She had lived there since 1956, when her father first rented it.
0:26
Six days later, the Spanish government passed two emergency laws.
0:31
In Spain, people are already calling them the Maricarmen Decrees.
0:35
Pedro Sánchez: I've heard the PP say I'm a traitor on this too.
0:38
Pedro Sánchez: I'm not sure what being a traitor means. A traitor to whom? To the vulture funds…
0:42
That's the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez,
0:45
answering critics who called the new laws a betrayal.
0:49
So who is a home in Spain really for?
0:52
The people who live in it or the people who invest in it?
0:58
This is Pollar.
1:00
Everything in this episode comes from reporting already published,
1:03
and where people disagree, you'll hear each side in its own words.
1:08
Today, one eviction in Madrid, but also the story behind it.
1:12
Because this isn't the first time Spain has
1:14
watched people being carried out of their homes.
1:17
And how it ended up in parliament.
1:20
On Friday, Spain's Congress threw out both of the government's new laws.
1:24
And now the prime minister is deciding whether to call a snap election.
1:34
So first, why this one?
1:36
Spain sees tens of thousands of evictions a year.
1:40
Why did Maricarmen stop the country?
1:42
Reporting collected by Pollar says an investment
1:44
company called UrbaGestión bought her flat in 2020.
1:49
It wanted her out or paying far more.
1:52
Reports put its demand as high as two thousand six
1:54
hundred and fifty euros a month, about five times her rent.
1:58
The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the owner won.
2:03
So legally, she lost.
2:05
Yes.
2:06
And on the twenty-third of September,
2:08
she left the home she'd known for seven decades on a stretcher and went to hospital.
2:13
It's worth being clear about what that means.
2:16
Nobody broke the law here.
2:18
The landlord went to court, the court sided with it,
2:21
and the police carried out a court order.
2:23
Which is exactly why it landed so hard.
2:26
If this is what the system looks like when it's working...
2:29
That image travelled.
2:31
That evening, thousands of people gathered in Madrid, not outside her building,
2:36
but outside a penthouse the regional government had bought with public money.
2:41
Their banners demanded it be given to her.
2:43
Which tells you the anger wasn't only about one landlord.
2:47
It was about who gets a home in Spain at all.
2:50
And the numbers behind that are stark.
2:53
A report by the trade union CCOO in August found that only thirty-one percent
2:58
of Spaniards aged eighteen to thirty-four live without help from their families.
3:03
Down from forty-one percent in 2016, the steepest fall in Europe.
3:09
This is the best educated generation Spain has ever had.
3:13
Youth unemployment has come down,
3:15
and still nearly seven in ten either live
3:17
with their parents or depend on their help.
3:20
Across the European Union, young people leave home at about twenty-six on average.
3:25
In Spain, it's thirty.
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Thirty.
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And the union's conclusion is that the barrier isn't jobs anymore.
3:33
It's the rent.
3:35
On Saturday the twenty-sixth,
3:37
the Tenants' Union set up camp in the Puerta del Sol, Madrid's central square.
3:42
By Wednesday, the union counted more than twelve hundred tents.
3:46
And there were camps in other cities too, from Seville to Palma to Barcelona.
3:51
So that's why this eviction.
3:53
It turned a statistic into a face,
3:56
an old woman and a generation that can't leave home,
4:00
looking at the same problem from opposite ends.
4:03
But to understand why the problem is this big,
4:05
you have to go back almost twenty years.
4:19
So how did Spain get here?
4:22
Where does this start?
4:23
By the early 2000s, Maricarmen had already lived in her flat for nearly fifty years.
4:29
Around her, Spain was building homes at an extraordinary rate.
4:33
Credit was cheap, prices kept rising,
4:36
and buying felt like the safest bet a family could make.
4:40
And then 2008.
4:42
The global financial crisis hit.
4:44
The bubble burst, and hundreds of thousands of
4:47
families were left with mortgages they couldn't pay.
4:49
Between 2007 and 2011, Human Rights Watch counted almost three
4:55
hundred and fifty thousand foreclosure cases started by banks.
4:58
Maricarmen wasn't one of them.
5:00
Her family rented.
5:02
But there was a cruel detail in Spanish law at the time.
5:06
If the bank took your home, you often didn't walk away from the debt.
5:10
The home was valued at a fraction of what it had been worth,
5:13
and you still owed the difference.
5:15
So people lost the house and kept the mortgage.
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That's where a lot of today's anger was born.
5:21
In February 2009, in Barcelona, a group of activists founded the PAH,
5:27
the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages.
5:30
They physically stood in doorways to stop evictions.
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By 2016, it said it had stopped more than two thousand of them.
5:38
One of its founders and its first spokesperson, Ada Colau,
5:42
went on to become mayor of Barcelona from 2015 to 2023.
5:47
So the people who stood in doorways ended up running the city.
5:51
Which tells you how deep this runs in Spanish politics.
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Then comes the rescue.
5:56
In 2012, the European Union offered Spain up
6:00
to a hundred billion euros to rescue its banks.
6:03
One condition was a so-called bad bank to take
6:06
over the property loans the banks couldn't handle.
6:09
A company called Sareb, created in August 2012.
6:13
Okay.
6:14
Stop.
6:16
Bad Bank.
6:17
Vulture Fund.
6:18
What are they?
6:20
Imagine a bank full of loans that are never going
6:22
to be paid back and half-built flats nobody wants.
6:26
That bank can't lend to anyone while it's carrying all that,
6:30
so the government creates a separate company,
6:32
the Bad Bank, and moves all the rubbish into it.
6:36
The real bank is clean again.
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The Bad Bank's job is to sell the rubbish off slowly for whatever it can get.
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And the vulture funds?
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Those are the buyers, big international investment
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funds that buy up things when they're cheap because
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someone is desperate to sell: flats, loans,
6:55
sometimes whole blocks with tenants still living in them.
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Then they wait for prices to rise and raise the rent.
7:02
So vulture because they arrive when something's dying.
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That's the insult, yes.
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The funds would say they're investors who bought what
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nobody else wanted and put money into a market that had none.
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And the most famous example is in Madrid.
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In 2013, Madrid's city housing company, under the then mayor Ana Botella,
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sold 1,860 social housing flats to a company owned by
7:28
the American fund Blackstone for about 128 million euros.
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The sale was fought over in the courts for years.
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In 2020, Spain's Supreme Court confirmed that the former mayor was cleared.
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So families who'd rented from the city woke up with a landlord they'd never met.
7:48
Which is Maricarmen's story too, decades later.
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Her landlord wasn't a family who owned one flat.
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It was an investment company, UrbaGestión, which bought her home in 2020.
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So that's one wave, the crash, the evictions, the funds.
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What's the second?
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The second is tourists.
8:08
Last year, Spain had a record 96.8 million foreign visitors,
8:13
according to the National Statistics Office.
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Almost 100 million in a country of almost 50 million people.
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And a lot of them don't stay in hotels.
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Official figures count about 340,000 tourist flats in Spain.
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Each one is a flat that could, in principle, be somebody's home.
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Which brings us to Barcelona.
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In July 2024, around 2,800 people marched through the city,
8:51
according to police, and some of them sprayed tourists with water pistols.
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The signs said, "Barcelona is not for sale."
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And it didn't stay in Barcelona.
9:02
In June, organisers say more than 25,000 people marched in Málaga,
9:07
where rents have gone up by about a third in a decade.
9:10
In July, in Palma, organisers say 70,000 marched against mass tourism in Mallorca.
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Police said 25,000.
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At the end, police fired rubber bullets.
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So the anger is everywhere tourists are,
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but Barcelona is where the city itself acted first, and the answer was drastic.
9:36
Jaume Collboni: The Catalan Parliament's latest regulation allows us, and we will use it,
9:43
Jaume Collboni: not to renew tourist apartment licences from November…
9:51
Barcelona's mayor, Jaume Collboni, announced that from 2029,
9:56
the tourist apartment, as it's currently known, would disappear from the city.
10:00
That's every one of Barcelona's 10,000 or so
10:03
licensed tourist flats gone by November 2028.
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The rules were challenged, and in March 2025,
10:12
Spain's Constitutional Court upheld the Catalan law behind them.
10:16
And nationally?
10:17
Did anyone try to fix the whole thing?
10:19
In 2023, Spain passed a national housing law.
10:24
It let regions declare areas where the rental
10:26
market was under pressure and cap rents there.
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Catalonia was the first to use it in March 2024.
10:34
And did it work?
10:35
It depends who you ask.
10:37
One academic study found the number of new
10:39
rental contracts fell where the cap applied.
10:42
Its effect on rents was much less clear.
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Supporters say it protected tenants.
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Critics say it pushed landlords out of renting.
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So that's how Spain got here, a crash that took people's
10:54
homes and left them the debt, funds that bought the pieces,
10:58
a tourism boom that turned flats into holiday lets,
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and a generation priced out of all of it.
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Which is the world Maricarmen's landlord was operating in
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and the world the government tried to change in six days.
11:21
A quick word about Pollar.
11:23
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11:26
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11:29
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12:05
Back to Madrid.
12:07
The tents are still up in the Puerta del Sol.
12:10
And on Friday, Spain's parliament voted on the
12:12
government's answer to Maricarmen's eviction.
12:15
This is where the whole story has been heading.
12:18
Six days after she was carried out, the government passed two emergency laws.
12:23
People here call them the Maricarmen Decrees.
12:27
And an emergency law works differently?
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It does.
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In Spain, an emergency decree comes into force straight away,
12:34
but then parliament has 30 working days to approve it.
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If it says no, the law is scrapped.
12:41
That vote was on Friday.
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So before we get to the vote, what was actually in them?
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Three big ideas.
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One, if you're vulnerable and you have nowhere else to go,
12:54
you can't be evicted until 2030.
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If you can't pay, the state pays your landlord the rent they're owed.
13:02
Two, big investment funds can't snap up homes on the cheap.
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If a flat is worth €200,000, a fund can't buy it for less than 140,000.
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So no more bargain hunting by the vultures.
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That's the idea.
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And three is the big one.
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At the moment, a rental contract in Spain comes to an end after a few years.
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When it does, the landlord can ask you to leave or ask for a lot more money.
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Which is what happened to Maricarmen.
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Right.
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Under the second decree, as long as you pay and keep to the rules,
13:35
your contract just keeps rolling on.
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A landlord can still take the flat back for a good reason,
13:41
like needing it for their own family,
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but they have to give a year's notice and pay a year's rent in compensation.
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So for a tenant, that's security.
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And for a landlord, it's a flat they can't easily get back,
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which is why that part is in its own decree.
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So if parliament voted it down, the rest could survive.
14:00
Then here's what I actually want to know.
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Would any of this have saved Maricarmen?
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Honestly, probably not directly.
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The new laws didn't reach back to cases the courts have already decided,
14:12
and the courts ruled that her family's old lease had run out when it passed to her.
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The Tenants' Union says rules like these would have protected her,
14:21
but nobody can say for sure.
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So Friday, what happened?
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The vote came just after 3:00 in the afternoon.
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First, the decree with the eviction ban.
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The Speaker of the Congress, Francina Armengol, read out the result.
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Francina Armengol: So, here is the result of the vote.
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Francina Armengol: Votes cast, 350. In favour, 172. Against, 178.
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Francina Armengol: No abstentions. The royal decree-law is therefore repealed.
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172 for, 178 against.
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Repealed.
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And it had already been the law.
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It came into force that week,
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and it had already stopped at least one eviction in Barcelona.
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Then it was gone.
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And the second one, the rolling contracts?
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That lost by more, 166 to 184.
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So the part everyone expected to survive didn't,
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and the part they expected to fail failed badly.
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So who voted no?
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The Popular Party and Vox, as expected.
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They'd said all along they were against both.
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But they don't have a majority on their own.
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No.
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The deciding votes were Junts,
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seven MPs from a Catalan party whose votes put Sánchez back in power in 2023.
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On Thursday, they announced they'd vote no.
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Why?
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In their words, many of the measures will
16:03
have the opposite effect of what is intended.
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Fewer flats for rent, higher prices,
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and an even harder time for people on low incomes.
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So the landlord's argument.
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Partly.
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But in the chamber, their spokesperson, Míriam Nogueras,
16:19
also attacked the laws from the other side.
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She said they still let speculators buy homes and still let them evict people.
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Too much for some, not enough for others.
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And on the second decree, the Basque Nationalist Party, the PNV,
16:35
voted no as well, another party that usually backs the government.
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And everyone else?
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Voted yes.
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The Socialists, their coalition partners in Sumar,
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and the parties further to the left.
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The Tenants' Union had called splitting the package in two a disgrace,
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but it backed both decrees.
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And it got personal.
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It did.
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The Catalan left-wing MP, Gabriel Rufián, held up a 50 euro note at Junts.
17:02
That, he told them, was their flag.
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And then there's Madrid, where the fight has become about who's to blame.
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Sánchez accused Madrid's conservative regional government
17:12
of caring more about that penthouse than about Maricarmen.
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The region's president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, hit back.
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Ayuso says the courts applied the law and the region
17:24
offered Maricarmen a place in a care home three times.
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And she says about 25,000 people are evicted in Spain every year under
17:32
national laws that Sánchez's government has had eight years to change.
17:37
So that's the politics.
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But even if the laws had passed, would they have worked?
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The Bank of Spain says the real problem is simple.
17:46
Spain isn't building enough homes.
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Every year, more than 200,000 new households need somewhere to live,
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and the country finishes only about 100,000 new homes.
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So protecting the people who already have a
17:59
home doesn't create homes for the ones who don't.
18:02
And the builders had already warned it could make things worse.
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The head of Spain's property developers said builders called him within two days,
18:10
planning to sell new flats instead of renting them out.
18:14
The government and the tenants answer that the
18:16
problem isn't only how many homes there are,
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it's who owns them and what they're used for.
18:22
The funds, the holiday lets, the empty flats.
18:25
Both can be true.
18:27
Protection keeps people like Maricarmen in their homes.
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It doesn't, on its own, build the next one.
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So where does Friday leave Spain?
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Possibly heading for an election.
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Before the vote, Sánchez made a speech in the chamber that nobody had expected.
18:44
He told the Popular Party and Junts that if the laws fell,
18:47
the blame would be theirs.
18:48
Pedro Sánchez: …the interests of a property elite, which may be legitimate,
18:52
Pedro Sánchez: but are certainly not the interests of ordinary people.
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Pedro Sánchez: Do the right thing, because otherwise history will judge you
18:59
Pedro Sánchez: sooner than you think, and more harshly than you imagine.
19:02
Do the right thing, he told them, because otherwise history will
19:07
judge you sooner than you think and more harshly than you imagine.
19:11
Sooner than you think.
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A lot of people heard that as a hint.
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After the vote, government sources told Spanish media
19:19
that Sánchez is considering a snap general election.
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The date being talked about is the twenty-ninth of November.
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He has no public engagements this weekend.
19:29
He's using it to decide.
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And there's a deadline.
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In Spain, an election is held fifty-four days after it's called.
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So for the twenty-ninth of November, he'd have to call it by Tuesday.
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Otherwise, the next one isn't due until next year.
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The opposition wants it now.
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The leader of the conservative Popular Party,
19:49
Alberto Núñez Feijóo, spoke after the vote.
19:53
Alberto Núñez Feijóo: No decree was voted on today to help Maricarmen, or anyone.
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No decree was voted on today to help Maricarmen or anyone, he said.
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And to Sánchez, you have your excuse.
20:08
Set the date.
20:09
Dissolve Parliament.
20:10
Call the election.
20:12
And outside the Congress, while all this was going on,
20:15
there were people banging pots and pans.
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A speaker at the protest outside the Congress: So let them be clear: we're going to keep fighting!
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A speaker at the protest outside the Congress: General strike!
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So let them be clear, one speaker told the crowd.
20:37
We're going to keep fighting.
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And the chant was for a general strike.
20:42
The Tenants' Union says the camp goes on.
20:45
So one eviction moved a government in six days,
20:48
and Parliament undid it in an afternoon.
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And the woman those laws were named after still hasn't gone home.
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As for Maricarmen,
21:00
on Tuesday she accepted a deal with the company that owns her flat.
21:04
When she leaves hospital, she can go home on an eight-year lease,
21:08
paying no more than thirty percent of her income.
21:12
But she's still in hospital,
21:14
and the people around her say they're worried about her health.
21:17
The camp in the Puerta del Sol is still there.
21:19
The union says this was never only about one woman.
21:23
And it isn't only about Spain.
21:25
Look across Europe this year.
21:28
In Berlin, organisers say eleven thousand people marched
21:31
in September for rent caps and a ban on evictions.
21:35
A German trade union study this summer found rents in the
21:38
country's forty biggest cities up fifty-one percent in a decade.
21:42
And somewhere behind those numbers are people like Maricarmen.
21:46
We just don't know their names.
21:48
And next door, Portugal went the other way.
21:51
In July, its government approved plans for faster evictions for
21:55
unpaid rent and to scrap a cap on rent rises in new contracts.
21:59
Parliament is still debating them.
22:01
Its argument: loosen the rules and some of the country's estimated two
22:06
hundred and fifty thousand empty homes will come back onto the market.
22:10
So two neighbours, the same problem, opposite answers.
22:14
Spain is betting on protection.
22:15
Portugal is betting on the market.
22:19
And Brussels has now weighed in.
22:21
In September, the European Commission proposed an Affordable Housing Act,
22:25
letting cities restrict holiday rentals in the most stressed areas,
22:29
the kind of thing Barcelona has been fighting in court to do.
22:32
The Commission's Executive Vice President, Teresa Ribera, said that when the market
22:37
fails to deliver an affordable home,
22:39
public authorities have a responsibility to act.
22:43
Which brings it back to Spain,
22:45
because the next few weeks could decide which of those two paths it takes.
22:49
If Sánchez does call an election, the polls don't agree on who'd win.
22:54
The government's own pollster, the CIS, had his socialists ahead last month.
22:59
Most private polls put Feijóo's Popular Party first,
23:02
and some suggest the Popular Party and Vox together would have a majority.
23:07
And the Popular Party has its own housing plan.
23:10
It's been before the Senate since last year.
23:12
It would speed up building permits and scrap the rent
23:15
caps in the two thousand and twenty-three housing law.
23:18
So closer to Portugal, build more, regulate less.
23:23
And if there's no election,
23:24
Sánchez still faces a parliament that won't pass his housing laws.
23:29
Either way, whatever replaces the Maricarmen decrees, if anything does,
23:33
will be decided by the same parliament that just said no or by the next one.
23:39
But the tents are still up.
23:41
And that's it for this episode.
23:43
We hope you enjoyed listening to this episode of Pollar.
23:48
Sources for this episode are at pollar.news.