On September 23, María del Carmen Abascal, 87, was carried out of her flat on Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda on a stretcher. The crowd outside chanted her name, Maricarmen. She’d lived there about seventy years and never missed the rent. The company that bought the flat in 2018 wanted more each month than her entire pension, and it turned down every offer to keep her there. Tens of thousands marched through Madrid; a protest camp went up in Puerta del Sol.
Nine days later Congress threw out the two housing decrees Pedro Sánchez had rushed out in response, 178 votes to 172 on the first. He’d ruled out an early election again and again. On Monday he went on television, called one for November 29 and admitted he’d fallen short of his promises. It was the most accurate thing he’s said in a long time.
Not bad luck. Not a Catalan ambush. He had it coming.
He Promised the Homes. Count Them.
Start with a simple test: how many of the homes he promised can you live in?
In July 2018, weeks into his first term, the minister then in charge of housing announced 20,000 affordable rental homes on public land, to be built within four to six years. In 2023 Sánchez announced the same 20,000 homes again, as if they were news. That minister was José Luis Ábalos. In June the Supreme Court gave him 24 years and three months in the pandemic face-mask case, on counts running from bribery to criminal organisation. No former Spanish minister has ever been handed more.
For this parliament he promised 184,000 public and affordable homes. Ask his government how many exist and you get a count of homes “mobilised” (120,479 of them), a word that lumps keys handed over together with plots nobody has urbanised yet. It won’t say how many are finished. If the answer flattered him, it would.
Don’t take his opponents’ word for it. The CIS, the polling agency his own government runs, has had housing as Spain’s top worry for 22 months straight. The Bank of Spain, governed by his former minister José Luis Escrivá, puts the shortfall built up since 2021 at about 755,000 homes and warns it could pass a million by 2028.
After parliament let the eviction moratorium for vulnerable tenants lapse early this year, his government sat on a replacement for months. UGT, the socialist union that has marched beside his party for more than a century, signed a statement saying exactly that on the day Maricarmen was evicted. It took a stretcher on the evening news to get anything moving.
Then he turned it into theatre. Junts asked him to pull the decrees and redraft them. He refused, his party demanded a roll-call so every no would be on the record, the decrees fell, and three days later he called the election his party had threatened beforehand. Ask who that served. Maricarmen is due back home under a deal brokered by Madrid’s city housing company, after the owner had turned down his ministry’s offers to buy the flat. His campaign got its opening scene.
The Dock Is Full of His Picks
Spanish analysts have said the quiet part out loud: housing is safer ground for him than corruption. It’s easy to see why.
He made Ábalos his party’s organisation secretary, the post that runs the machine, then his minister. When Ábalos fell in 2021, Sánchez gave the same party post to Santos Cerdán, the man he sent to Brussels to sit across from Carles Puigdemont. Cerdán spent months in pre-trial detention last year and remains under investigation over alleged kickbacks on public works; a second judge is examining whether he and a party fixer tried to undermine the cases circling the party and the government. The attorney general Sánchez appointed was convicted last November in a leak case. Sánchez himself faces no charges. He picked every one of them.
Then there’s the family. His brother David was convicted this summer over a provincial job that a Badajoz court called a tailor-made suit; he’s appealing. His wife, Begoña Gómez, has been sent to a jury trial on influence-peddling and embezzlement charges she denies.
The deals run on the same instinct. In 2019 he said he wouldn’t sleep at night with Podemos ministers in his cabinet; two days after that November’s election he signed a pact to govern with them. The same autumn he promised on live television to bring Puigdemont back to face Spanish justice. In 2023, needing Junts’s seven votes to stay in Moncloa, he traded them an amnesty instead and called it making a virtue of necessity.
The necessity was his.
He’s governed for three years on a budget passed in December 2022. In June he promised a budget this year and an election next year. The election came first.
Somebody Else Always Pays
Ceuta has been here before. In May 2021 close to 10,000 people crossed from Morocco in two days, weeks after his government quietly let the Polisario Front’s leader into a Spanish hospital. Ten months later Sánchez gave Rabat what it wanted on Western Sahara, in a letter to Morocco’s king that his own coalition partner wasn’t consulted on. That letter was supposed to buy a quiet border.
On July 30 the border gave way. Between 50,000 and 70,000 people crossed into a city of 84,000 in about two days, and dozens died trying. Was anyone warned? His government’s own declassified files say yes: the intelligence service told its office in Ceuta the day before about calls online to storm the fence and swim round it. The warning reached a chief of staff on WhatsApp and went no further. Ceuta’s president asked for a national emergency on day one, and the interior ministry said no. Sánchez’s line ever since has been that nobody could have foreseen the scale. Two months on, thousands are still stranded in the city.
Twenty-two EU governments wrote to Brussels and named his migrant regularisation as a possible pull factor. That scheme went through by decree in January, with no vote in parliament. His government expected about half a million people. Nearly 1.2 million applications came in. For two years he’s told Spaniards they must choose between being open and prosperous or closed and poor. If he believes it, he should have built for it: Spain added close to a million households in four years, and the building never caught up.
Defence went the same way. In 2024 Spain spent a smaller share of its economy on defence than any other NATO member. It hit the 2% that allies had pledged back in 2014 only in 2025, a year late, by cabinet decision on a rolled-over budget. Before last year’s summit at The Hague he made Spain the only one of 32 allies to refuse the new target, and he called the exemption a success. Everyone else covers the difference.
On November 29 the bill finally reaches him.