{"id":15250,"date":"2026-11-10T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2026-11-10T17:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/?p=15211"},"modified":"2026-11-10T06:18:55","modified_gmt":"2026-11-10T11:18:55","slug":"spain-from-occupation-to-general-strike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test01\/2026\/11\/spain-from-occupation-to-general-strike\/","title":{"rendered":"Spain: From occupation to general strike"},"content":{"rendered":"

W<\/span>hen the Polic\u00eda Nacional of Madrid raided Mar\u00eda del Carmen Abascal\u2019s 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 Urbagesti\u00f3n had purchased her property and tripled her rent<\/a> 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 \u201cjust doing their job,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

After getting the call from the tenants’ union, hundreds of activists came to defend Maricarmen\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Maricarmen\u2019s case may be cruel, but it is not exceptional. In 2025, there were 24,540 evictions<\/a> 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> 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<\/a> in Barcelona led to her suicide. The first quarter of 2026 saw 4,005 evictions<\/a> 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<\/a>, according to a recent state-sponsored poll.<\/p>\n

As Alicia del R\u00edo and Valeria Racu, two spokespeople of Madrid\u2019s powerful tenants\u2019 union, \u201cSindicato de Inquilinas\u201d (SdI), recently wrote<\/a> in El Pa\u00eds<\/em>, \u201cthere are moments when thousands of small histories suddenly converge into History with a capital H.\u201d This is one of those moments. The seed is falling on ground during a political juncture where it is likely to be particularly fecund.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that this movement has gone beyond a simple protest for housing and has become an indictment of the entire political system.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Backdrop to a social explosion<\/h4>\n

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<\/a>, triple the predicted growth rate in the broader Eurozone. It is dramatically outpacing the other \u201cBig Four\u201d EU countries, Germany, France, and Italy, all of which are experiencing near-stagnation.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>, 14.1 percent of employed Spanish workers are unable to adequately heat their homes<\/a> during the winter, 10 percent have fallen behind on housing-related bills, and 25.7 percent of the population<\/a> is classified as \u201cat risk of poverty or social exclusion.\u201d<\/p>\n

This stagnation has fallen especially hard on young people, who see themselves increasingly condemned to a life of precarity and struggle. Spain\u2019s youth unemployment rate sits at 22.8 percent<\/a>. While this is down from its post-2008 peak of 55.44 percent in 2013<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the rich across the Spanish state are doing very well for themselves. In 2022<\/a>, the top 1 percent accumulated 26-27 percent of total new wealth, while the top 10 percent held 60 percent of the country\u2019s 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<\/a>. 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<\/a>, particularly in the energy, banking, and food retail sectors, while wage recovery from the pandemic has stalled completely.<\/p>\n

This social explosion comes after eight years of \u201cthe most progressive government in history,\u201d a social democratic alliance led by PSOE, the traditional center-left social democratic party. PSOE governed in successive coalitions with Podemos\u2014the young reformist project that filled the void left by the retreat of 15M, the \u201cIndignados\u201d upsurge in 2011\u2014and then with Sumar, which could perhaps best be summed up as Podemos without the hope.<\/p>\n

Rents have risen 45 percent in the last 8 years<\/a>, and according to SdI, there have been an estimated 300,000 evictions<\/a> during the past eight years of this \u201cprogressive\u201d government. To add to the dissatisfaction are the slew of scandals affecting PSOE and Prime Minister Pedro S\u00e1nchez\u2019s inner circle, the increased military spending<\/a> since the war in Ukraine, and the failure of this government to keep its promise to repeal the 2015 \u201cLey Mordaza<\/a>\u201d\u2014an 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.<\/p>\n

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 <\/a>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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. Spanish imperialism in North Africa has long been a defining feature of the Spanish far right, nearly as central to its raison d’etre<\/em> as its opposition to the regional nationalisms. This, combined with fascist-adjacent VOX’s virulent anti-immigrant racism, frames the crisis as an \u201cinvasion\u201d against which Spanish Christendom must be defended, as in the days of the medieval \u201cReconquista.\u201d VOX poll numbers have surged to 18 percent. Before Maricarmen\u2019s 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, \u201cthe problem is the invaders,\u201d and the housing movement has cleverly flipped that into \u201cthe problem is the investors.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the period of \u201cthe most progressive government in history,\u201d 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\u2019s 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<\/a> before her eviction.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It has grown around a few core demands<\/a>:<\/p>\n