Demonstrations that erupted after the police broke down an 87-year-old woman’s door to evict her from the Madrid apartment where she had lived most of her life brought Spain’s housing and affordability crisis to the front burner of the country’s politics on Thursday.
Thousands of protesters took to the streets across the country late Wednesday night amid an outcry over the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal, who was brought out of her apartment on a stretcher from apparent exhaustion and was still in the hospital as of Thursday afternoon.
The eviction has touched a nerve among Spaniards angry over rising housing prices, and it has heaped pressure on the leader of Spain’s left-wing government, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who last year promised that housing would be his government’s priority.
Ms. Abascal’s eviction sparked a new round of political finger-pointing, with progressive politicians blaming conservatives, while conservatives played the case down and accused opponents of rabble-rousing.
The eviction came as Mr. Sánchez spoke at the United Nations General Assembly, seeking to present himself and Spain as an alternative to authoritarian politics and as a standard-bearer of humane liberalism. In a speech on Wednesday morning, alongside Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York, Mr. Sánchez touted his government’s social policies, including restrictions on evictions.
The uproar over the eviction followed Mr. Sánchez to New York, where the first question he faced at a news conference on Wednesday afternoon was about Ms. Abascal’s situation. His government, he said, would provide a “response” to what he called a “social tragedy.”
As the eviction was being carried out, hundreds of activists had barricaded themselves outside the home of Ms. Abascal, known as “Maricarmen,” in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent it.
“Where is the progressive government?” protesters chanted outside Ms. Abascal’s home.
“I really don’t understand how it is possible that the government can’t do anything,” Ms. Abascal’s lawyer, Beatriz Duro, said in an interview. “She is an older woman; she is a woman whose physical decline we have seen in real time, someone who has lived and suffered.”
Ms. Duro declined a request for an interview with her client, saying that Ms. Abascal was still convalescing in a hospital and overwhelmed by the media attention.
Ms. Duro said the national government had tried to reach an agreement with Urbagestión, the real estate company that owns the apartment, but that the effort had failed. Urbagestión did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.
Ms. Abascal’s father had held the lease for the apartment when the family moved there in the 1950s. He passed it on to his wife, who in turn passed the rent-controlled apartment to Ms. Abascal in 2005.
In 2020, the property was bought by Urbagestión, which raised her rent from €500 ($570) about to €2,650 a month, far more than she could afford on her monthly pension of €1,350, Ms. Duro said.
The company tried to evict her three times, but courts blocked the attempts until the case reached Spain’s Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the owner, arguing that her inherited rent-controlled lease had legally expired under Spanish law.
Mr. Sánchez’s minority government could send a bill to Parliament as early as next week that would make evictions more difficult, but it is unclear whether it would pass. A party on which Mr. Sánchez has repeatedly depended to pass legislation is more supportive of landlords’ rights. A similar bill failed to pass in February.
If that legislation had passed, Mr. Sánchez said on Wednesday, “we would not have the situation that Maricarmen is experiencing.” He blamed a political opponent, the conservative regional leader of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, for letting the eviction happen.
Ms. Ayuso played down the significance of the case on Thursday, calling it “one eviction out of the 25,500 that take place every year in Spain.” She also accused Mr. Sánchez of encouraging people to protest.
Right-wing parties across Spain argue that progressive housing policies that expand tenants’ rights hurt small property owners and encourage squatting. In 2025, Ms. Ayuso called Mr. Sánchez an “accomplice” of squatters.
Ms. Abascal, caught in the middle of the political furor, may go to live with a relative in a one-bedroom apartment in another province, “but that’s not a solution,” Ms. Duro said.
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