Spain, Sánchez dissolves the Cortes: vote on November 29 amid streets in revolt over housing

Pedro Sánchez has dissolved the Cortes and called early general elections for November 29. The announcement, made from the Moncloa Palace, comes nine months ahead of the legislature’s natural expiry and brings to an early close a government already marked by weeks of social tension over housing.

The decision follows Parliament’s rejection of the two housing decree-laws that the executive had introduced in response to the mobilization sparked by the eviction of an elderly woman in Madrid. Sánchez has publicly acknowledged that his government made mistakes and did not achieve all the goals it had set itself: an admission that is far from a given for a sitting president on the very day he announces a return to the polls.

The reaction from the Popular Party was immediate, greeting the news with a terse “finally”. Sánchez, for his part, defended his government’s record in these terms:

“We have fought against the worst possible opposition” — Pedro Sánchez, President of the Spanish Government

The November 29 vote comes in a country swept, on the very day of the announcement, by new demonstrations against soaring rents. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Madrid and other Spanish cities, in marches tied precisely to the housing crisis that formed the backdrop to the legislature’s early collapse: the same issue that had led to the rejection of the decrees and, as a result, to the dissolution of Parliament.

In Barcelona the protest turned into clashes, with barricades set on fire in the streets of the city center. In Valencia the mobilization led to five arrests and nine police officers injured. The available sources do not specify whether today’s demonstrations had already been called before Sánchez’s announcement or whether they simply coincided with it in timing: these therefore remain two distinct events, linked by the same underlying issue but not by a causal connection stated by the sources.

The picture that emerges is one of a crisis moving along two parallel tracks within the same hours: on one side the political choice to return to the polls, on the other a street that does not wait for the vote to make its protest heard. For Spain, this is the first early general election of this legislature, called nine months ahead of its natural expiry: a timetable that leaves parties less than two months to build an election campaign.

That campaign will almost certainly be fought over the very issue that brought down the government. Access to housing was at the center of both the parliamentary rejection of the decrees and the street protests recorded on the same day as the announcement of the early vote, and it is unlikely to leave the center of the debate over the coming eight weeks. On November 29, Spanish voters are called to choose a new Parliament amid heated streets and an outgoing executive that admits, in Sánchez’s own words, to not having achieved all of its goals.