Sanchez calls November 29 snap election after parliament kills his housing decrees

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called a snap general election for November 29, after a parliamentary defeat on housing reforms crippled his minority government and triggered national protests. Sanchez announced the election following a weekend of what his office, Moncloa, called a "period of reflection", after Congress voted down two emergency housing decrees on Friday. The measures — which included a ban on evicting vulnerable tenants until 2030, a two-year extension of rent freezes on existing contracts, and restrictions on speculative purchases of homes — were defeated when Junts, the Catalan right-wing separatist party whose seven MPs have repeatedly propped up his government, joined the conservative Popular Party and the far-right Vox in voting against them. The decrees were a response to Spain's deepening housing crisis. The immediate spark was the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who was removed from the Madrid apartment where she had lived for more than 70 years after an investment fund bought the building and pushed her rent from about €500 toward €2,650 — unaffordable on her pension. Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets last week, and a camp in Madrid's Puerta del Sol has become a symbol of anger over rents, evictions and the growing difficulty of buying a home. The election will cut short a legislature that Sanchez, Socialist prime minister since 2018, had intended to run until 2027 — despite never having been able to approve a budget. If the timetable holds, the decree dissolving parliament will be published on Tuesday, with the 54-day period required by electoral law leading to a vote on November 29. Sanchez is gambling that the issue that exposed his government's weakness in parliament can instead strengthen it at the ballot box. "To do more, we need to renew and broaden the support of the people," he said in a televised address, adding that his aim was "to secure a much broader, progressive majority" in parliament. "The time has come, therefore, for the Spanish people to decide what future you want for yourselves and for your country," he said. The tenants' union that drove the protests said it would press on with more mass rallies and a possible general strike, keeping housing at the centre of the campaign. Early polls suggest the Popular Party and Vox could win enough to form a majority — a prospect that would return the right to power in Madrid and redraw Spain's political map. For a prime minister who survived years of parliamentary fragility by bargaining vote by vote, the defeat on the one issue he claimed as his flagship proved one bridge too far. Spain now faces two months of campaigning dominated by the question no government in Europe has answered: who gets to live in the cities where people work.