The false narrative surrounding the ‘Maricarmen’ case under the Sánchez government

Maricarmen Abascal, aged 87, has finally returned to her home in Madrid from which she had been evicted after living there for 70 years. The dispute, as well as triggering a wave of protests, has prompted Pedro Sánchez to propose two decrees aimed at banning evictions until 2030 and guaranteeing the automatic renewal of tenancy agreements. “The Sánchez government is very weak and facing a serious crisis of support. It is trying to shift the debate on the housing issue so that there is no talk of the government’s corruption cases or of urgent and real problems such as immigration and, above all, the crisis in Ceuta,” Diego Sánchez de la Cruz, director of research at the Instituto Juan de Mariana and author of the book The Madrid Model. A Liberal Revolution 1995–2025’ (Ibl Libri).

Diego Sánchez de la Cruz believes that “the media and political circles close to the government have presented the case of this 87-year-old woman facing eviction in a populist and manipulative manner”. Undoubtedly, the story of an elderly woman who suddenly finds herself thrown out onto the street makes a strong impression. “The point is that this woman pays a rent typical of the Franco era. As her tenancy agreement had expired and several legal proceedings had already taken place, she was informed that the owners of the property wished to take possession of it. However, the woman had been offered two alternatives. In other words, it is not true that she would have been left on the street.”

What are the alternatives? "I think we almost all agree that in a modern state, if a person stops paying their rent, they shouldn’t end up on the streets. In fact, both the Community of Madrid and the City Council had offered her accommodation in a social housing block. She lives in a 140-square-metre flat near Retiro Park, one of the most upmarket areas of Madrid, and was paying 500 euros a month, a figure that was clearly unprofitable for the landlords. However, she refused, on the advice of far-left groups that had mobilised. In the end, the property company essentially gave in under pressure from a brutal campaign. In reality, it is not a large company as has been claimed, and certainly not a vulture fund. Rather, it is a small property company with eight employees, who even had cockroaches sent to their office. They were threatened, demonstrations were organised against them, they were publicly targeted by the government, and in the end they realised it was impossible for a small company to survive all this propaganda and, above all, all this harassment from state institutions, which used the case as a ploy.”

And what is the likely outcome of the new decrees? “We will continue to face the same problems we already had in the rental market, only they will be even more serious. Ever since Pedro Sánchez’s government began controlling rent prices and also made it easier to squat in properties or terminate tenancy agreements, the result has been that nobody wants to rent out their property anymore. That is why there are fewer and fewer properties available to rent and, consequently, finding a vacant one is becoming a very serious problem for both young and older people.”

Polls suggest that 48.8 per cent of Spaniards consider the housing issue to be a serious problem. Estimates indicate that investment in the property sector would need to double to 10 per cent of GDP to resolve the problem, given that the shortfall between supply and demand stands at 2.1 million units. At the current rate, it would take 60 years to resolve the housing shortfall. “At present,” says Sánchez de la Cruz, “the existing shortfall is equivalent to the scenario where not a single house were to be built in Spain for ten years. If we want to resolve the problem, it is impossible to imagine that making rents financially unsustainable would persuade anyone to invest in new housing and then put it on the market. Furthermore, there are all the restrictions the government is introducing through a highly complex town planning system and a very rigid housing bureaucracy. In Spain,” concludes the director of the Instituto Juan de Mariana, “to build a new residential complex, one has to wait ten years for the administrative procedures to be completed.”