Thousands of people marched in Madrid on Thursday in memory of María del Carmen Abascal, the 87-year-old whose dramatic eviction two weeks ago shook the country and prompted Spain’s left-wing prime minister to call snap elections over a housing crisis.
Before her death on Wednesday, Ms. Abascal, popularly known as Maricarmen, became a symbol of the housing crisis. Only about 20 percent of Spaniards have to rent their homes, but that share has increased in recent years as homeownership — deeply ingrained in Spain’s culture — slides further out of reach.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has portrayed his decision to hold elections as a chance for his left-wing bloc to get a majority in Parliament that would tackle the housing crisis. But it remains far from clear whether the issue will sway enough voters, as conservative and far-right parties frame the election as a referendum on Mr. Sánchez himself.
And as the parties wrangle, many Spaniards are staying in the streets, saying they feel crushed by the problems of rising rent and stagnant wages.
Nationally, rents have risen 87 percent since 2015, while salaries have climbed only 28 percent, according to an analysis by the newspaper El País. As a result, many young Spaniards stay in their parents’ homes well into their 30s. Newly arrived migrants pack into small apartments with other families. And many longtime residents are forced to leave their neighborhoods as their rents jump.
I spoke with dozens of protesters on Thursday evening about why they had joined the march, their own housing situations and what Ms. Abascal meant to them.
‘The last straw’
In Madrid’s Puerta del Sol, a central plaza of the capital and the origin of Thursday’s march, hundreds of tents have sprung up since Ms. Abascal’s eviction.
Among the protesters there was Alejandra Osés, a 22-year-old creative writing graduate student who has camped out for 10 days. “It’s becoming very difficult to find a place to live,” she said. “Maricarmen was the last straw.”
Ms. Osés shares an apartment in Madrid that rents for €1,500 a month, or about $1,680. While apartment hunting, she encountered rooms “without windows, places with barely any space, where you had to squeeze past a wardrobe to get into a room.”
After that struggle, she said, “the question is: How could I not be here?”
Beside her was Santiago Larraín, 22, a Chilean immigrant who studies acting and takes occasional jobs in cleaning and hospitality. He shares a two-bedroom apartment outside Madrid with his mother, who works as a cleaner, and two siblings. They pay roughly $1,345 a month.
“I’m here today because I have a mother,” he said. “And I think about how my mother could be Maricarmen, because we’re also going to be forced out of our apartment.”
Finding housing in Spain, he said, is a “bingo game of compassion and pity” with tenants left at the whims of the market.
‘A martyr for this social cause’
A few hundred meters away, near Madrid’s landmark Bear and Strawberry Tree statue, hundreds of demonstrators had gathered, including Fernando Manjón, 29, and João Didelet, 27.
“Maricarmen has become something of a martyr for this social cause,” said Mr. Manjón, who earns $1,900 a month working for a nonprofit and shares an apartment that rents for $1,400 a month. When his landlord recently tried to raise his rent, he successfully challenged the increase.
“Life is already difficult,” he said. “I mean, paying rent, living in Madrid and then wanting to save for other things — it just gets harder and harder.”
Mr. Didelet, from Portugal, pays $460 for a room in a shared apartment, an amount many others consider cheap. But he cannot imagine being able to afford a place of his own.
“That’s a dream I can’t even contemplate,” he said.
‘The madness has reached us’
Alfonso Lechón, 72, a retired teacher, looked over an altar the tenants’ union had set up beside a photograph of Maricarmen.
Mr. Lechón has owned his apartment in San Blas, a working-class neighborhood on Madrid’s outskirts, since 1982. He also inherited a small property by the beach and receives a decent pension.
“Personally, I have nothing to complain about,” he said. “But what I see around me is complicated.”
His neighborhood has changed dramatically, he said. In his apartment complex, built by a taxi drivers’ cooperative, rents have nearly doubled in recent years, from $670 or $780 a month to more than $1,345.
“The madness has reached us there, too,” he said.
He said he also worries about his son, who rents an apartment in Galicia, and his grandson.
“I think we need to make housing a right, just like education and health care,” he said.
‘Maricarmen isn’t the only one’
Carlos Sánchez, 36, an architect, said he had joined the demonstration because he was deeply moved by Ms. Abascal’s death.
“Maricarmen isn’t the only one. There are many people in Spain who are losing their homes,” he said.
Mr. Sánchez shares an apartment with a roommate in Lavapiés, a neighborhood popular with tourists. They pay $900 a month, far below the $1,345 he estimates the apartment would fetch on the market.
He considers himself lucky to have a landlord who raises the rent only in line with inflation. “It sounds like I’m standing here describing the world’s greatest landlord,” he said, “when really he’s just the kind of landlord every landlord should be.”
As an architect, he has struggled with poorly paid jobs and internships. Rising rents and stagnant wages, he said, had left him with little hope for the future.
“It just eats up your salary,” he said of high rents. “You’re left with nothing.”
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