Thanks, Maricarmen

Maricarmen is 87 years old and had lived for more than seventy years in the same apartment in the Retiro neighborhood, in the capital of the Kingdom. A little over a week ago, the police removed her from her home, on the fourth attempt, while hundreds of neighbors tried to stop it. The apartment had passed into the hands of an investment fund that wanted to charge her a rent impossible for a pension of 1,450 euros. In principle, nothing new: in the State, tens of thousands of evictions take place every year, and the Balearic Islands are the community with the highest rate of rental evictions, many of them of elderly people with pensions much lower than Mari Carmen's. The difference is that this time the country has seen it, and a reaction has arrived that, given the housing emergency situation, was long overdue.

But it has arrived, and it was about time. Since the 15-M movement and the PAH struggles, which had placed the right to housing at the center, the dominant narrative had taken a perverse (and sponsored) turn: from the indignation over evictions, we had moved on to the story of squatting, 'inquiokupación' (tenant squatting), and the sacred right to private property. Talk shows, headlines, and election campaigns have been filled with squatters, alarms, and eviction companies, while real, silent, and legal evictions happened every day without making a noise. Mari Carmen has suddenly flipped this framework: the great threat is not the squatter, it is the vulture fund.

I have said other times that without a home there is no possible life project: there is no rooting, no job stability, no calm schooling for children, no dignified old age, nor emancipation for the youth. Housing is today the right that conditions access to all others. We defended this a few months ago from the Civil Society Forum at the joint Congress-Senate commission on insularity, with data from the Islands in hand: skyrocketing prices for both rent and purchase in a society where more than half of wage earners do not reach 18,000 euros per year, while one in three homes is not a habitual residence; more than 13,000 young people trained here who live outside... Who can become emancipated like this? Who can think of having children?

The Mari Carmen case has done what years of reports and data had failed to achieve: it has made politicians press the accelerator. This very week, the Council of Ministers approved two decrees that extend protection against evictions for vulnerable people, ban vulture fund purchases for a few years, and automatically renew rental contracts. These are insufficient measures, but they would have represented a step forward if they had passed validation in Congress, and above all, they break a historical inertia. These measures or proposals did not fall from the sky: they were wrenched by a massive mobilization, with clear leadership from tenants' unions, which have filled the streets and camped out at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and in many other cities. Organization, not charity!

It is not just our phenomenon. A few days ago, in Berlin, Die Linke became the leading force with a campaign focused on housing: rent freezes and the expropriation of large landlords, as the public had already voted for in a referendum in 2021. Among those under 35, it swept the vote. When the left talks about people's material living conditions, people listen.

Because the underlying issue is this: leaving housing in the hands of the market is not neutrality, it is a political decision. It is making policy in favor of those who have the most, those who accumulate apartments and turn them into a financial asset. In the Balearic Islands, there are thousands of homes in the hands of owners with more than one hundred houses, while the Ibavi manages about 2,500, and the wealth tax cut has meant failing to collect hundreds of millions that we now do not have to implement housing policy. The market does not distribute according to need, but according to the ability to pay. That is why we must decommodify: public rental housing stock, land banks, rights of first refusal and retraction, cooperative housing, real limits on tourist rentals, and declaring a territory that clearly is one a stressed area.

JuntsxCat has been exposed, just as the far-right has, quite disoriented by the mobilization against their true masters, the speculators. Abascal tweeted that "if she were called Morocarmen, she would have a house." The phrase is false, because migrant people are among those most punished by the housing crisis; and above all, it is disgusting, because it uses the pain of an elderly woman to stir up irrational hatred. But it is also revealing. Mari Carmen has not lost her home because of any migrant, but rather because of an investment fund and laws that allow them to do so. The far-right points to those at the bottom so that those at the top remain untouchable; it defends the interests of speculative capital and disguises them as patriotism. For the moment, they are winning without having to govern, but thanks to Maricarmen, from now on they will not have it so easy.