Four marches set off from different corners of Madrid last Saturday and converged on Plaza de Cibeles, rallying behind a central slogan: ‘Towards a general strike’. Over at Puerta del Sol, protesters have been camped out for a week in protest at the cost of housing and rising rents. There were demonstrations in other cities too, and in Valencia protesters clashed with police.
The spark was already there. What lit the powder keg was the ordeal of Maricarmen Abascal, an 87-year-old Madrid woman who uses a wheelchair and found herself facing eviction from the flat she had lived in for seven decades. The demonstrations stopped the eviction, and Abascal was able to return home, paying about 500 euros a month, as she had for years. The investment firm that now owns the property had initially demanded 2,650 euros!
Meanwhile, activists from countries such as Italy and Ireland have been in Madrid in recent days, opening a Europe-wide debate on the housing crisis. According to Eurostat, house prices across Europe rose by 53 per cent between 2010 and 2024, and rents by 25 per cent. In Estonia the rise was 208 per cent; in Ireland and Hungary it topped 100 per cent.
In Spain itself, the Sanchez government has failed to get two housing decrees through a fragmented parliament. Among other things, they include a ban on evictions until 2030 and rules on temporary leases and room rentals. The socialist governing coalition is in a very tight spot, with elections on the horizon and housing now a top political issue.
It is hardly a problem confined to Spain, and we get it here too, in small and eye-wateringly expensive Cyprus. Or perhaps we don’t, being not much of a society. The housing crisis began years ago and the situation remains unbearable, while parliament and successive governments fuss over investors, patting their heads and theirs alone, keeping up their… revolutionary and philanthropic rhetoric on rents and housing.
All this while the debate rages in parliaments and on the streets of many European cities, and in Nicosia (and on Limassol’s ‘riviera’) a building-development ‘logorrhoea’ goes on and on. No control, no limits, no rules for foreign investment firms, until we too see homeless people on the uncomfortable benches of Eleftheria Square and are moved, or at least ask ourselves why the hell a one-bedroom flat costs 1,000 euros a month. Or why the big sharks’ property listings are filling up with homes repossessed from our fathers and grandfathers.
