On Saturday 3 October, four marches set off from across Madrid and poured into Plaza de Cibeles. Their headline slogan: “Towards a general strike”. Down at Puerta del Sol, protesters have been camped out for a week over the cost of renting and rents that keep on climbing. Other cities took to the streets too, and in Valencia protesters clashed with police.
The tinder was bone dry. The match was Maricarmen Abascal: 87 years old, confined to a wheelchair, and facing eviction from the Madrid flat she had called home for seven decades. The protests stopped the eviction in its tracks. Abascal got to go home, paying about 500 euros a month, just as she had for years. And what had the investment firm that now owns the property originally wanted? A cool 2,650 euros in rent.
Nor is this just a Spanish row. Activists from Italy, Ireland and elsewhere have been in Madrid these past few days, turning the housing crisis into a Europe-wide debate. Eurostat’s figures tell the story. Across Europe, house prices jumped 53 per cent between 2010 and 2024, and rents 25 per cent. In Estonia the rise was 208 per cent. In Ireland and Hungary, it more than doubled.
Meanwhile, the Sanchez government couldn’t get two housing decrees past Spain’s splintered parliament. Among other things, they included a ban on evictions until 2030 and rules on temporary tenancies and room rentals. The Socialist coalition is on the ropes, with elections looming and housing now a top political issue.
And no, this isn’t only Spain’s problem. We know it all too well here in tiny, eye-wateringly expensive Cyprus. Or maybe we don’t, because let’s face it, we’re hardly a society worth the name. Our housing crisis started years ago and it is still unbearable, while parliament and one government after another fuss over investors, patting their heads and no one else’s, and keep churning out their oh-so-revolutionary, oh-so-charitable rhetoric on rents and housing.
Across Europe, the debate is raging in parliaments and on the streets. In Nicosia (and on the Limassol ‘riviera’), meanwhile, the building carries on with its endless ‘blather’. No checks. No limits. No rules for foreign investment firms. And so it will go on, until we too find homeless people on the hard benches of Eleftheria Square and feel a pang, or at least start asking why the hell a one-bedroom flat costs 1,000 euros a month. Or why the listings of the big sharks are bursting with homes repossessed from our fathers and grandfathers.
