Spain working to pass a housing decree on Tuesday

Na political rally in the town of Getafe, the secretary-general of the PSOE recalled that, on Saturday, Maricarmen Abascal, the elderly woman who was evicted from her home this week in Madrid, asked for measures in defense of the tenants.

“Maricarmen, I have a message for you. The government is working in counter-clockwise to present next Tuesday the decree-law on housing, and I ask the parliamentary groups one last effort to get it approved in parliament”, said Pedro Sánchez.

The socialist leader added that this effort must be made “by Maricarmen and the millions of Spaniards who suffer from the housing crisis”, since “it is not a question of ideology, it is a question of humanity”.

The Porta do Sol square, in the center of Madrid, dawned today with hundreds of people camped to ask for measures to respond to the housing crisis and to ensure that the protest has no date to end.

The tents at Porta do Sol, in the tourist heart of the Spanish capital, and in front of the presidency of the regional government of Madrid, began to be placed on Saturday night, at the end of a demonstration against evictions and demanding measures to protect tenants and facilitate access to a house.

According to the organizers, the Association Union of Tenants and Tenants, there were 300,000 people at the Saturday demonstration, while the authorities say it was 25,000.

The demonstration was called with the motto “neither a Maricarmen more” after the eviction, on Wednesday, of Maricarmen Abascal, 87 years old.

Maricarmen was evicted from the house where she lived since 1956 in central Madrid by the police, in compliance with a court order that gave reason to the investment fund that bought the apartment.

The Union of Inquiries and Inquiries says that the camp in Sol has as its first goal to be approved in the next Council of Ministers of the Government of Spain, on Tuesday, “the Maricarmen decree”, with measures that prevent evictions such as this week and others to promote access to housing.

Soon on Wednesday, the Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, promised to send to the parliament “urgently” a bill for housing, after classifying as “social tragedy” what happened with Maricarmen Abascal.

In the following hours and days, it was known that the parties of the left government (Socialist Party and Somar) resumed negotiations with parliamentary groups such as the Together by Catalonia (JxCat, conservative) to ensure the feasibility of this law, repeatedly promised by the Government.

The five ministers of the Somar threatened not to enter the Council of Ministers room on Tuesday if the decree is not on the agenda of the meeting.

Maricarmen Abascal herself asked on Saturday, from the hospital where she is hospitalized, that the demonstration serve to “change the laws that allowed” her eviction and said that “on Tuesday the decree-law must be approved to take a first step to end this nonsense”.

In a video released on the account in the social network X of the Union of Tenants and Tenants, Maricarmen asked Pedro Sánchez for what happened to him “do not happen to other people”.

They are camped at the Sungate between 500 and 1,000 people, according to the authorities and the Tenants and Tenants Union.

The image is already being compared in Spain with that of the Indignant Movement, which in 2011 led thousands of people to camp for a month in the same place in protest against austerity measures and the consequences on employment and standard of living.

The association said that throughout today there will be assembly to decide more concretely about the future of the camp.