Spain: From occupation to general strike

When the Policía Nacional of Madrid raided María del Carmen Abascal’s home to forcibly remove the 87-year-old from her apartment of over 70 years, they undoubtedly did not expect to kindle a nationwide explosion for dignified housing. The housing company Urbagestión had purchased her property and tripled her rent to more than her entire monthly state pension. As these pigs told the old woman and the protesters who had gathered to defend her that they were “just doing their job,” they certainly did not suspect that this would be the spark that would ignite a hot autumn in Madrid and across all of the Spanish state.

After getting the call from the tenants’ union, hundreds of activists came to defend Maricarmen’s home from the police on the night of September 23. The police brutally arrested protesters, forcibly removed the disabled tenant, and brought her to a hospital. Three days later, 300,000 people marched through the streets of Madrid to protest against both this eviction and the widespread unsustainable state of housing across Spain.

As they often do, the demonstration ended in Puerta del Sol, the city center, a bit like Times Square, though less garish. Instead of dispersing, however, thousands of protesters occupied the square, demanding the return of Maricarmen to her home, a moratorium on evictions, and a law for indefinite contracts with automatic renewal.

Maricarmen’s case may be cruel, but it is not exceptional. In 2025, there were 24,540 evictions across the Spanish state, with nearly seven thousand in Catalonia and 2,267 in Madrid. The very same day that Maricarmen was expelled from her home, another eviction took place a handful of miles away in the working-class suburb of Vallecas, where a father and son were thrown out onto the streets. Earlier in September, the eviction of a mother of two in Barcelona led to her suicide. The first quarter of 2026 saw 4,005 evictions across the Spanish state. On average, renters spend 50 percent of their income on housing, causing the question to become the most important political issue for people across the nation, according to a recent state-sponsored poll.

As Alicia del Río and Valeria Racu, two spokespeople of Madrid’s powerful tenants’ union, “Sindicato de Inquilinas” (SdI), recently wrote in El País, “there are moments when thousands of small histories suddenly converge into History with a capital H.” This is one of those moments. The seed is falling on ground during a political juncture where it is likely to be particularly fecund.

It’s important to note that this movement has gone beyond a simple protest for housing and has become an indictment of the entire political system.

The volatility of the Spanish situation is not unique. It is emblematic of the larger international political situation: an economic state of affairs that is increasingly untenable for ordinary people, the failure of the new social democratic progressivism to address this, new social movements that are beginning to succeed in reaching traditional working class sectors, and the long and grim shadow of far-right electoral success looming with menace over all.

This article will trace some specifics of recent history that led to this social explosion in the Spanish state and plot some possible futures for the Spanish Left. It will then connect this social explosion to the broader political moment internationally to help draw out the character of the current period, and pose strategies for the Left appropriate to this character. There is now an opportunity to forge new bonds between social movements and the working class.

Backdrop to a social explosion

To begin with the economy, recent years have found Spain in a contradictory position. On paper, the economy is doing modestly well, especially relative to the rest of the developed world and its European neighbors in particular. Its GDP is projected to grow 2.1 percent in 2026, triple the predicted growth rate in the broader Eurozone. It is dramatically outpacing the other “Big Four” EU countries, Germany, France, and Italy, all of which are experiencing near-stagnation.

Yet, this boom has been driven almost exclusively by extensive growth, by adding new jobs to the economy without improving their productivity (which has flatlined in the country) or the compensation and working conditions of those jobs. The growth in GDP masks a more complex reality where real wages have declined to roughly 7 percent below their 2020 levels, 14.1 percent of employed Spanish workers are unable to adequately heat their homes during the winter, 10 percent have fallen behind on housing-related bills, and 25.7 percent of the population is classified as “at risk of poverty or social exclusion.”

This stagnation has fallen especially hard on young people, who see themselves increasingly condemned to a life of precarity and struggle. Spain’s youth unemployment rate sits at 22.8 percent. While this is down from its post-2008 peak of 55.44 percent in 2013, most of the jobs that have been created are precarious, in tourism and the service sectors. A huge percentage of the youth pursue university degrees that no longer guarantee economic stability as they did for their parents.

The housing market is where the divide between generations is the most stark. The older generations benefited from a market where housing was relatively proportional to wages. Today that connection is completely severed. Only 14.5 percent of people under 30 years old live independently, and 85.5 percent still live with their parents. Average rent for a solo apartment would consume 98.7 percent of the average young worker’s salary.

Meanwhile, the rich across the Spanish state are doing very well for themselves. In 2022, the top 1 percent accumulated 26-27 percent of total new wealth, while the top 10 percent held 60 percent of the country’s total wealth. The bottom 50 percent of the country held only 7 percent of total wealth. In 2025, CEO compensation rose 16 percent, while average salaries rose only 3.6 percent. As was the case across the world, all sorts of divides were exacerbated by the pandemic, and wealth inequality spiked. Corporate profits shot up, going from their historical baseline of 10.5 percent to 13.9 percent, particularly in the energy, banking, and food retail sectors, while wage recovery from the pandemic has stalled completely.

This social explosion comes after eight years of “the most progressive government in history,” a social democratic alliance led by PSOE, the traditional center-left social democratic party. PSOE governed in successive coalitions with Podemos—the young reformist project that filled the void left by the retreat of 15M, the “Indignados” upsurge in 2011—and then with Sumar, which could perhaps best be summed up as Podemos without the hope.

Rents have risen 45 percent in the last 8 years, and according to SdI, there have been an estimated 300,000 evictions during the past eight years of this “progressive” government. To add to the dissatisfaction are the slew of scandals affecting PSOE and Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s inner circle, the increased military spending since the war in Ukraine, and the failure of this government to keep its promise to repeal the 2015 “Ley Mordaza”—an authoritarian law that allows fines for unannounced protests and disrespect toward police officers, broader powers for police searches, and legal protection for immediate expulsions of migrants attempting to cross the border.

The left organizations are also increasingly discredited on the national scene. Podemos reached its peak electoral success in 2015, when it secured 20.7 percent of the vote, but has since fallen to an estimated 3.7 percent of total national support. Stepping into its place and retreating politically, Sumar won 12.3 percent of the vote in the July 2023 general election, but its support has since declined to an estimated 5.7 percent across the country. The contradictions of entering a coalition government and having to take responsibility for the disappointment with the limitations of the reformist project have drained these organizations of the vitality they once had. They continue to limp along, but mostly in a hollow state, with low levels of active membership.

As across much of the world, the crisis, combined with the failure of the institutional left, has sent people looking for scapegoats and into the hands of the far right. Previous to the eviction of Maricarmen, the defining features of Spanish politics were the cascading scandals in PSOE and the mass crossing of migrants at the Spanish North African enclave at Ceuta. Spanish imperialism in North Africa has long been a defining feature of the Spanish far right, nearly as central to its raison d’etre as its opposition to the regional nationalisms. This, combined with fascist-adjacent VOX’s virulent anti-immigrant racism, frames the crisis as an “invasion” against which Spanish Christendom must be defended, as in the days of the medieval “Reconquista.” VOX poll numbers have surged to 18 percent. Before Maricarmen’s eviction and the calling of new elections for November 29, it was near certain that VOX and an increasingly Trumpified Partido Popular would take power after the August 2027 elections. Now, however, the housing movement has recaptured this energy and is the principal actor setting the national agenda. One of the far-right slogans read, “the problem is the invaders,” and the housing movement has cleverly flipped that into “the problem is the investors.”

During the period of “the most progressive government in history,” the organizations of the extra-parliamentary Left also accumulated forces and developed power. This was particularly true for the national network of tenants’ unions informally led by Madrid’s Sindicato de Inquilinas, which, starting in 2017, slowly began to accumulate power and become a central pole of attraction for the Left. What seemed like a spontaneous explosion was as much a result of sudden rage as the nine years of slow and tedious groundwork, building power neighborhood by neighborhood throughout the Spanish state. It is indicative of this groundwork that Maricarmen was in touch with SdI before her eviction.

Sindicato de Inquilinas is a very politically sophisticated organization with deep roots in the anticapitalist left. Most of its core cadre come from these traditions, whether socialist or anarchist. These cadre have absorbed, through study and personal experience, a lot of the key lessons of the past cycles of struggle and have adapted themselves accordingly, with great success.

It has grown around a few core demands:

• Rent reduction of 50 percent
• Public expropriation of empty housing and housing owned by vulture funds
• A return of all tourist apartments to the rental market
• Indefinite contracts without rate increases
• Outlawing of the eviction-for-hire groups (Desokupa thugs)
• End of all evictions
• End of housing speculation
• Expand public housing stock and dissolve SAREB (vulture state bank, formed in 2012 to clean up the country’s financial sector following the 2008 real estate and banking crisis).

In a certain sense, SdI is a united front of the radical Left that has successfully broken out of the social backwaters we have long been stuck in, and has reached broader layers of the working class. It’s interesting to read sober reflections on the experiences of the Left through the last decade from members of the group. In a recent article in “El Salto,” members of SdI compared the differences between 15M in 2011 and the uprising today, reflecting on hierarchy and organization and specifically citing Vicent Bevins’ If We Burn. This is an organization that is learning, that is engaged with the past with an eye toward the future. As a united front organization, it is radically uneven and contains a lot of anarchist and reformist tendencies (sometimes in the same people). Revolutionary socialists have been and need to continue to work within the organization to pull new members to the left and pull the core cadre toward genuine revolutionary socialist positions, arguing for the need for specific revolutionary organizations in addition to the broad organs of the class.

After the encampment

By September 29, six days after Maricarmen’s eviction, 1,200 tents were set up in Puerta del Sol. A small community emerged, with duties distributed, voting assemblies, and political organizing and discussion happening everywhere. Within a week, over 60 demonstrations took place throughout the Spanish state, and other encampments began to fill the centers of major cities. On October 3, an estimated 500,000 people flooded the streets of Madrid to demand change from the national government.

The encampments around the country have had to fend off attempts by far-right street thugs to violently break them up. As early as the third of October, a fascist group, Indignados por España, tried to break up the encampment in Sol. In Oviedo, in the province of Asturias, four members of far-right groups were arrested for assaulting people at the local encampment after shouting Nazi slogans and giving the fascist salute. On the highly nationalist “Día de la Hispanidad” (Spanish Heritage Day), hundreds of far-right sympathizers, mostly quite young, approached the encampment, giving fascist salutes and singing the fascist anthem “Cara al Sol” and chanting “rojo muerto, abono para mi huerto,” “a dead red is fertilizer for my garden.”

Responding to the demands of the housing movement, Pedro Sánchez’s cabinet approved two emergency decree-laws: one suspending evictions until 2030, the other guaranteeing indefinite rental contracts. Under Spanish law, these had to be ratified by the Congreso de los Diputados within thirty days. The expectation was that the former would pass, the latter would fail, and that these crumbs would be enough to appease the housing movement. SdI was very clear, however, that “if indefinite contracts are not approved, this country is governed by the housing speculators.”

When the time came for a vote on October 2, Sánchez’s parliamentary majority fell apart. The bourgeois Catalan nationalist party “Junts” refused to support either piece of legislation, and the legislation failed as a result. The tenants’ union began to call for a general strike, and Sánchez, recognizing the shifting winds and the possibility of riding this housing discontent to an extended tenure, called for snap elections for 29 November.

With Parliament dissolved, the previous legislative measures were raised again by the government almost unchanged as two new decree laws, published on October 7, which now have been ratified Permanent Deputation, the reduced body of 69 deputies that stand in for Congress until a new one is elected. The first decree contains an eviction ban that lasts until 2030, a 2 percent cap on rent increases through the end of 2027, compensation for tenants if landlords do not extend contracts, restrictions on property purchases by vulture funds, landlord tax breaks, and a €10 billion “help to buy” program offering up to €50,000 in interest-free loans for first-time homebuyers. The second decree makes rental contracts renew automatically. Both are provisionally in force, but they lapse if they aren’t ratified by November 13. The vote is scheduled for the 12, and the first is expected to pass, but the second, the heart of the movement’s demands, is likely to fail since the PNV, the Basque Nationalist Party, opposes it. Even if they do pass, the next government could repeal them, and Sánchez is counting on this to frighten voters into keeping him in power.

Meanwhile, the movement in the streets secured an important victory by forcing Maricarmen’s landlord to sign a new lease with her on October 2nd. Yet tragically, on October 7, the day before she was set to sign the new lease, Maricarmen suddenly died, prompting new demonstrations and memorials accusing the state and the vulture funds of social murder.

The encampment itself has followed a different trajectory from its 2011 predecessor. After the decrees of October 2, the assembly at Sol voted to stay indefinitely, but SdI deliberately scaled back its presence to prepare for the general strike. What remained in Sol held out until the police cleared it on November 3, removing 334 people and arresting 2.

The general strike

The housing movement has not been the only protest movement rocking Madrid in recent weeks. The teacher’s unions (at the forefront of working class militancy, as is often the case), went out on indefinite strike on October 14, demanding a lower maximum number of classes per week, smaller class sizes, and a raise of €600 per month. The demands are inseparable from housing since one analysis recently found that a newly hired teacher in Madrid would have to spend 65.4 percent of their net salary on rent. The social and political ties between these two movements are deep, and on the first night of the strike, thousands of teachers marched to Sol to join the encampment. Madrid doctors also walked out on strike on October 28, with demands that overlap with Madrid’s longstanding public health movement, Marea Blanca. Within weeks, three sectoral struggles over housing, education, and health have converged against the same regional government headed by the Trumpist Isabel Ayuso.

Sindicato de Inquilinas had built enough power and legitimacy for itself that it was able to influence the labor movement, acting as the key liaison between the movement in the streets and the major unions. It had built sufficient credibility for itself that it could realistically call for a general strike. The left-wing unions were easy enough to bring on board, but SdI’s ability to meet with the heavily bureaucratic CCOO (Comisiones Obreras) and UGT (Unión General de Trabajadores), the largest and most prominent labor unions in the country, and pull them into calling a general strike for November 11, shows the gravity that the tenants union now carries.

The strike has also gained the support of the regional nationalist unions like the Galician CIG and the Basque ELA and LAB who are adding their own set of demands related to regional autonomy.

Inevitably, the general strike will be of an extremely hybrid character. Like many large bureaucratic unions, the political method of the CCOO and UGT over the last decades has been aptly defined as “traicionar luchando,” “to betray while fighting,” although the CCOO in particular has a strong Marxist-inspired left wing in its ranks.

These unions did not want this strike. They have been the determined partisans of the “social peace” that has defined the neoliberal age, “ministers without portfolio,” as one analysis astutely referred to them. They will seek to limit the horizon of the struggle to within boundaries they can manage, essentially using it as a rally to keep a left coalition in power (a possible secondary aim being to demonstrate their willingness to fight to an incoming right-wing government). The fact that the general strike is limiting itself in advance to a single day shows the extent to which it is built on a compromise with a union bureaucracy that is willing to sacrifice effectiveness for security.

On the other hand, the general strike is an enormous opportunity for the anticapitalist Left to work in solidarity with a huge sector of strategically important workers in the CCOO and the UGT, including in the significant but forgotten manufacturing sector (it’s often overlooked that Spain has the second largest auto manufacturing industry in Europe). Through the general strike, the working class gains self-confidence through the practical experience of mass united action. It is a concrete lesson of the power of working-class united action. As Brais Fernández recently put it, revolutionaries must “construct the general strike in order to go beyond it.”

Reformism always has a vampiric relationship to movements in the streets. We saw this in the U.S. when the movement for Palestine breathed new life into DSA reformism without acknowledging this debt. In the Spanish state, reformism found rejuvenation through the militancy of Los Indignados in 2011.

Yet despite this limited truth, the overall dynamic is more complex and dialectical. The movement from below learns not to cede the space it has conquered to reformism, while, to try to find yet another rebirth, sections of the reformist bloc are forced to strategically adopt more militant tactics to keep the faith of its base and to mask its essence, which is betrayal. This in turn allows for revolutionaries to reach larger sections of the class who still maintain faith in these institutions, or do not yet see a credible alternative.

The revolutionary Left must continually contest the social democrats’ and union bureaucrats’ hegemony within the movement around the strike. SdI is spearheading an initiative that will leverage its geographic implantation—to form neighborhood strike assemblies, mass democratic spaces where strategy and tactics for the movement can be debated. By early November there were 1,340 strike committees across 108 cities and SdI had created a digital platform for people to find info on their local assembly. These bodies can coordinate their intervention in the strike, collectively raising demands that will pull the class toward them and away from the reformists. These may include, as Anticapitalistas suggests, a 50 percent rent reduction and linking rent to 20 percent of salary. These are spaces revolutionaries can work inside to push them to the left and make them permanent so that they can serve as tools of organization in coming struggles.

The November 29 election

The progressive bloc is seeking to use the movements in the streets to turn the elections from a referendum on Sánchez into a referendum on housing. The right wants to talk about everything but housing (and economic issues more generally). They want the focus to be on corruption in PSOE, immigration, and the culture war.

Over all of this hope and self-activity hangs the sobering executioner’s axe of the elections on November 29. The polls at this point are inconsistent, with the majority indicating a likely PP/VOX victory, but the more weighty (in both breadth and rigor) state-sponsored Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS) polls suggesting a victory for a PSOE-led coalition.

As CIS has a history of overestimating the weight of PSOE in the past, it’s perhaps possible to say that a PP/VOX coalition is the most likely outcome of the elections, though this is far from guaranteed. The promise of housing reform may not be enough to undo the last eight years of disillusion and disappointment. The desperate, false hope that, if the progressive Left was unable to deliver, then perhaps, somehow, the right’s program of anti-immigration and austerity will be able to improve living conditions for ordinary people—this could cause PP/VOX to prevail.

Other polling bears this out. A poll conducted by 40dB for El País y la Cadena SER found that two out of three people support limiting the cost of rent, even if this reduces profits for landlords. 55 percent of VOX and PP voters said they would support these measures. Another poll published by elDiario showed that 73 percent of people support a general strike to solve the problem of housing, including 61 percent of PP voters, and 63 percent of VOX voters. This shows that what draws the majority of these voters right is not conviction, but desperation, and that many of these people could be pulled left with the appearance of a credible alternative.

This situation is illustrative of how deeply the crisis is hollowing out the center and heightening social contradictions. VOX will almost certainly gain its largest showing, with all polls putting them just south of 20 percent. Their previous peak was 15 percent in the 2019 elections. The Francoist regime, still within living memory for many, has long acted as a brake on the far-right’s growth, but the generational turnover is beginning to seriously weaken that brake’s effectiveness. VOX’s influence on politics also goes beyond their numerical results in elections. They have been able to pull PP toward increasingly far-right positions to the point where the party could be justifiably described as Trumpist or at least Trumpifying.

If a PP/VOX coalition wins, the state will impose brutal austerity (including pension reform) and anti-migrant policies at the same moment when the social movements and working class activity are at their highest point in decades. This could either lead to a sustained period of heightened struggle, a test of strength in which the anticapitalist Left will continue to make inroads, or a period of defeats severe enough to force the working-class movement onto the back foot.

On the other hand, if CIS is right and victory is delivered to a PSOE-led coalition, the country would be set for another period largely similar to the past eight years, though with some important changes. While the coalition will no longer depend on the Catalan nationalist party, Junts, the strength of the Left within the coalition will be considerably weakened. In 2023, the Left ran on a shared ticket that won 12.3 percent of the vote and 31 seats in the legislature. Now in 2026, exacerbated by the failure of Podemos to reach an agreement with Sumar and the other small left parties, they are slated to win only 9 percent and 10 total seats.

Showing how the far-right learns from each other internationally, the leader of PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo is applying the Trump playbook by already casting doubts on the legitimacy of the elections, raising specters of mass fraud that have no basis in reality. This is something else with which the Left will have to contend in case of a PSOE victory.

Regardless of who wins (“gobierne quien gobierne” is the slogan in the streets, which repurposed it from the movement for public health in Madrid), there are certain features of the moment for the Left that will remain the same. In contrast to the period following 15M, when the new reformist Left surged into the space opened and then vacated by the youth movement, the new reformism is on life support, and the movement has learned some of the lessons that allowed the institutional Left to channel its energy into a reformist project. This does not mean that the reformist Left will not find a second life, but as it stands currently the movement in the streets looks strong enough that it can resist cannibalization by reformism.

Reforging the bonds between movement and class

It’s worth taking a look at some of the central differences between 15M and the current movement to think about how the moment has changed and what it means for the left.

2011 was still early days in the disintegration of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism’s onslaught successfully broke the bonds between the Left and the class, turning the Left into a marginal subculture, with rites and rituals increasingly alien to the broad working classes. The unions adopted a strategy of keeping their heads down to survive the onslaught, and were able by doing so—though sometimes just barely—to keep the living standards of their members above a certain level.

Now the process of the disintegration of the neoliberal order is in a more advanced phase. The ruling class is torn among itself, and is unable to present a coherent project that the majority of society can rally behind. The only way for the ruling class to continue to accumulate capital is by trying to extract further concessions from an already exhausted population. The unions can no longer keep living standards above a certain level for their members, even if they promise the state they will behave.

The movements of the squares in the 2010–2013 wave of protests were precisely the expressions of this separation between the movements and the class. Previous to the neoliberal age, this level of social discontent would have been channeled immediately into general strikes, which, in certain cases, would pose the question of social revolution. The movements of the squares floundered into dead ends due to this separation, because they had not yet built the organizational infrastructures through which they could begin to bridge this gap and continue forward, and because the unions were not yet under sufficient pressure to move.

In 2026, a lot has changed. The Left now has three decades of experience since its nadir in the 1990s. Organizations like Sindicato de Inquilinas are the concrete expression of this experience, slowly building power and legitimacy until it can take an occupation of a square, in this case Puerta del Sol, and translate that energy into a bridge to the class. Though an important starting place, how quickly SdI was able to leave the encampment to build the general strike highlights how far we have come since 2011, when the movements were permanently stuck in the squares. On the side of the unions, the economic struggles of their membership push these unions in the opposite direction until their tactics sometimes converge with the movement in the streets.

In short, the crisis is presenting renewed opportunities in the current period for reforging the ties neoliberalism severed. Yet this coalescence is far from automatic. It requires that the Left take itself seriously enough to carry out a united strategy to move toward further fraternization between the two now alien camps.

This poses some concrete tasks for the Left in the current period, both in the Spanish state and internationally.

First, the task of the Left outside of the Spanish state is twofold:

1. To find those struggles through which the Left can create broad and united organizations that can become strong enough to project their legitimacy to the class. Given the universality of precarious housing in the present age, mass tenants organizations pose an interesting possibility for filling this role, especially because of the space they can operate in, right between the economic and the political.
2. For those of us in the unions, we need to continue to push our unions toward the movement, to pressure them from below into united action with the Left on key economic and political questions.

I want to be very careful not to exaggerate how far along in this process the comrades in the Spanish state are, but at the same time it’s possible to say that some of the preliminary groundwork has been laid, and the task is somewhat different. Their task is to continue to pull the threads closer and closer together in order to begin to pose the questions of mass, united, and militant action, indefinite general strikes, and eventually social revolution, to make this a legitimate future in people’s minds.

By breaking the bonds of movement and class, the neoliberal period also broke the pattern of revolutions started in 1905 by the workers of the Russian Empire. Though the neoliberal age was rife with upheavals and political revolutions, we saw no social revolutions as such. They vanished. Now, neoliberalism in decay may be allowing us to seriously think through the possibility of social revolution on the old model that many had begun to worry was obsolete, of workers stopping production and restarting it again on a new anti-capitalist basis.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”
Featured Image credit: Barcex; modified by Tempest.