In Spain, the housing crisis is hitting politicians’ homes

When it comes to the right to housing, let he who is without sin cast the first stone – assuming, though not conceding, that it is indeed a sin to invest in property or even simply to buy a house, or perhaps two. In Spain, the emotional outcry over the eviction and death of the elderly Maricarmen Abascal has sparked a deluge of rhetoric against landlords – the so-called ‘rentiers’ – who are said to live off the blood of their tenants and are typically identified with investment funds, all of which are strictly labelled as ‘vultures’ and ‘foreigners’. This is a trend with a long history; Pablo Iglesias, the founding father of Podemos – a populist left-wing party born out of protests against a crisis caused precisely by a property bubble – knows a thing or two about it.

On 20 August 2012, Iglesias tweeted: “Would you entrust the country’s economic policy to someone who spends 600,000 euros on a luxury penthouse?” He was taking a dig at Luis de Guindos, who was then Minister for the Economy in Mariano Rajoy’s government. Less than two years later, Iglesias was elected to the European Parliament, and in 2016 to the Spanish Parliament. He later served as Deputy Prime Minister under Pedro Sánchez from 2020 to 2021, and in the meantime, together with his wife and political ally, the former minister Irene Montero, he purchased a villa in Galapagar (a small town just outside Madrid) in 2018, complete with a swimming pool and panoramic views of the Guadarrama Natural Park. A vivid example of ‘mimetic desire’, as theorised by the psychoanalyst and philosopher René Girard, the cost of the property is identical to that for which Luis de Guindos was criticised: 600,000 euros. The Podemos grassroots did not take this well, and the pair had to justify themselves: in that house, they wrote in a letter, we have invested our own savings and those of our parents, and we will be paying off a mortgage for thirty years. Welcome to the real world.

Moving from one penthouse to another, the President of the Autonomous Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso of the People’s Party, spent 6.3 million euros last April to purchase, through a public company, a luxury penthouse measuring over 500 square metres. Ayuso has always maintained that it was needed to temporarily house the Madrid administration’s offices whilst renovation work was carried out on the headquarters at Puerta de Sol (the site of the housing activists’ camp). It then emerged that her partner, Alberto González Amador (who is already the subject of proceedings for alleged tax fraud), had put up for sale the private penthouse in which the couple lived, in the same upmarket Chamberí neighbourhood. Suspicions that Ayuso intended to turn the property into a lavish residence using public funds prompted her to put the property up for sale, but the first auction attracted no bids and the second is due to close on 21 October. With the purchase procedure under scrutiny by both the ordinary courts and the audit authorities, it remains to be seen whether there will be any interested buyers.

However, Ayuso now has another ally to cling to: the socialist Montse Mínguez. In recent days, as the tone of controversy and populism has risen, journalistic investigation has deepened, turning into an easy target for hypocrites. The Spanish media have been digging into the family affairs of the MP – who is the parliamentary group secretary and official spokesperson for the PSOE – discovering that her partner, Sergi Vélez, runs a holding company with property assets worth several million euros, investments totalling 6.2 million and a portfolio of 30 rental flats from which, it is rumoured, Montse’s ‘deadbeat’ partner even dares to evict tenants in arrears. Furthermore, two of Vélez’s companies are based in Panama, but even those established in his home town of Lleida seem to be getting on quite well with the tax authorities. The latest scandal to emerge concerns the write-off of a 300,000-euro debt at precisely the time, in 2014, when Montse Mínguez was Councillor for the Economy in the Catalan city where the party has just decided to re-nominate her as lead candidate for the forthcoming general election.

Óscar López, the current Minister for Digital Transformation and Public Administration, is also a ruthless vulture. His ministry oversees the body that manages civil servants’ social benefits and their respective property assets. There is a tenant who, ironically, used to be Maricarmen’s neighbour across the street and had taken over his mother’s tenancy by exploiting the very same old law that had benefited his most infamous neighbour. In January, he received an eviction notice, signed by the minister.