'This is not a death, it's a murder': Spain marches after evicted 87-year-old dies
Maricarmen Abascal, evicted last month from the Madrid home she had lived in for more than 70 years, has died in hospital. Thousands marched on parliament as unions called a general strike over housing.
Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old Madrid pensioner whose eviction last month became the face of Spain's housing crisis, has died in hospital, the Madrid tenants' union said on Wednesday. Abascal had been in hospital for severe anxiety and exhaustion since September 23, when police and social workers removed her on a stretcher from the Retiro district flat she had lived in since 1956, paying an old regulated rent of about 500 euros from a pension of roughly 1,400 euros a month.
Within hours of the announcement, thousands marched from the Puerta del Sol, where housing activists have camped since late September, towards parliament. Their chant was blunt: this is not a death, it is a murder. Protests were also held in Barcelona. The tenants' union said an agreement with the company linked to the property's new owners would eventually have let Abascal return home after hospital. That solution, it said, came too late.
The political aftershock is already national. Trade unions have announced a nationwide general strike over housing on November 11. Last week parliament rejected decrees aimed at curbing evictions and limiting rent pressures, and Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who expressed condolences to Abascal's family, has called an early election for November 29. Housing, long treated as a market inconvenience, is now the issue on which a government will be judged.
The numbers explain the anger. Rents have risen by more than 100 percent over the last decade, according to the property portal Idealista, while supply remains scarce and old, affordable tenancies disappear one court order at a time. Abascal's case joined those numbers to a single human story: a woman who paid her rent for seven decades, removed from her home in old age because the property had become more valuable without her in it.
Spain is not being asked to choose between property rights and compassion in the abstract. It is being asked whether a housing system that can lawfully produce this outcome deserves to survive unchanged. The marchers in Madrid have given their answer. On November 29, the country will give its own.