Spain Snap Election: Sánchez Calls Vote For 29 November After Housing Revolt

Spain will go to the polls on 29 November after parliament rejected the minority government’s rental decrees, an 87-year-old’s eviction triggered mass protests, and corruption scandals have eroded the prime minister’s position.

What happened

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced in a televised address on Monday that Spain will hold a general election on 29 November, eight months earlier than the constitutional deadline of summer 2027. The decision followed parliament’s rejection over the weekend of two decree laws his minority coalition had put forward to protect tenants in the rental market — a defeat that exposed just how thin his parliamentary support had become.

“To push reforms through, we need a broader progressive majority” capable of “overcoming the resistance of the elites,” Sánchez said. He acknowledged errors: “We have made mistakes and have not achieved everything we set out to do,” pointing to “a lot of problems to solve, particularly in the areas of inequality, of public services and access to housing.”

His coalition — the Socialist PSOE with the junior Sumar alliance — holds no majority in Congress and has governed since 2023 on the support of Catalan and Basque nationalist and pro-independence deputies.

The eviction that moved a country

Housing stopped being a policy argument and became a national image. On 23 September, 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal was forcibly removed on a stretcher from the Madrid flat she had lived in for more than 70 years, and was later hospitalised.

A legal technicality allowed her landlord to raise her rent from €500 to €2,650 a month; it was subsequently reduced to €1,650 — still €300 more than her monthly pension. Her lawyer has since said she will be able to return home, but the photograph of her removal had already done what no policy paper managed. Tens of thousands demonstrated in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona on Saturday demanding stronger tenant protections.

What the government tried — and why it failed

The first rejected decree would have suspended evictions of vulnerable tenants until 2030, extended by two years rental leases expiring before 2028, raised taxes on tourist apartments, and restricted purchases of residential property by what the government calls “vulture funds.”

The second was more contentious, centred on the automatic renewal of rental contracts — a core demand of the left and of the tenants’ union Sindicato de Inquilanas.

The right argued intervention would shrink supply and push prices higher. “Housing doesn’t get cheaper with decrees, it gets cheaper with more homes,” said Juan Bravo of the People’s Party. That is the genuine policy dispute beneath the politics, and it will be the central argument of the campaign: whether a market distorted by demand-side pressure can be corrected by regulation, or only by construction.

The scandals underneath

Housing exposed a weakness that had been building for months. In April, Sánchez’s wife, Begoña Gómez, was charged with corruption after a two-year criminal investigation over alleged use of her relationship to advance her private career — allegations she denies, and which Sánchez has characterised as a right-wing effort to destroy his government. In May, police raided PSOE headquarters in Madrid investigating claims that an operative was paid to run a misinformation campaign; the party denies it. In June, former transport minister José Luis Ábalos was sentenced to 24 years in prison over a network that took kickbacks on pandemic face-mask purchases.

Sánchez also faced criticism over the Ceuta migration crisis during the summer, when large numbers of people crossed into the Spanish territory from Morocco.

What the election decides

Most opinion polls put the conservative People’s Party ahead as the largest single party, though none indicate a clean path to a majority; Feijóo would be expected to need the hard-right Vox party to govern. That dependency is the PSOE’s central attack line.

Feijóo’s response was combative: “At last, Spaniards will be able to decide.” He framed the vote as “not just another election,” offering voters a choice between “decline or change, lies or change, incompetence or change, division or change, corruption or change.”

Sánchez, prime minister since June 2018, has now committed his government to a contest he is polling behind in — a gamble that reads either as confidence that housing anger can be converted into turnout, or as recognition that his parliamentary arithmetic would only worsen. Since the Socialists finished second in 2023 and governed anyway through pacts, the interesting question is not simply who wins on 29 November, but whether any configuration of parties can actually form a government.