Madrid takes to the streets over housing, Congress had already rejected the decrees

The day after the parliamentary rejection, the streets of Madrid filled up. The Congress of Deputies rejected both of the government’s housing decrees: the first with 172 votes in favor and 178 against, the second with 166 in favor and 184 against. PP, Vox and Junts voted against.

Estimates of the number of participants in the Madrid demonstration diverge sharply depending on the source. The Delegación del Gobierno spoke of around 70,000 people in four marches converging on Cibeles; the Sindicato de Inquilinas, the organizer of the protest, claimed up to 500,000 demonstrators. A difference in scale that alone speaks to the distance between the two readings of the day.

The protest arose, according to reports, following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid, which became the symbol of the mobilization in the very days when Parliament was rejecting the government’s decrees. The spokesperson for the Madrid tenants’ union, Valeria Racu, explicitly linked the day of protest to a broader outlook: she “expects the general strike for housing will come ‘soon’” (transl. from Spanish).

The protests were not confined to the capital. In Málaga, the day before, the tenants’ union had estimated 50,000 participants, against 8,000 according to the Delegación del Gobierno — a gap similar to the one later recorded in Madrid. In Valencia, according to police sources cited by El País, the demonstration ended with five arrests and nine officers injured.

Against this political backdrop, El País reports that President Pedro Sánchez has reportedly begun weighing the possible calling of early elections. This is information reported by a single outlet, without independent confirmation at this time, but it fits into a picture — a double parliamentary rejection plus a street mobilization on a scale claimed in the hundreds of thousands — that increases pressure on the Spanish government precisely on the housing issue.