Spanish State: Country-wide Demonstrations Against Evictions
Featured image: National Police repressing one of the activists trying to prevent the eviction of Maricarmen. Source: Servir al Pueblo
On September 23, repressive forces of the Spanish State evicted Maricarmen – an 87-year-old woman living on 50% disability – on its fourth attempt, acting on orders of the real estate company Urbagestión. The eviction was carried out despite over 400 people camped up outside her residence in peaceful protest. She was carried out on a stretcher, in a weak state, and she was later admitted to Gregorio Marañón Hospital, Servir al Pueblo reports.
After the news of this spreading through the country, massive demonstrations were carried out in a show of the widespread discontent of the people. In Madrid, over 10,000 people took to the street that same afternoon, gathering outside the apartment of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, an apartment paid for by 6,3 million EUR worth of public funds. Outside the penthouse apartment of Ayuso, slogans such as“We are all Maricarmen!”, “Aysuo, resign!” and “the penthouse for Maricarmen!” were chanted. The protests have since continued and spread to other cities, such as Zaragosa, Valencia, Barcelona and Alicante.
Servir al Pueblo reports that this eviction is not an unique case, and on “that same day and in the same city, in the working-class neighborhood of Vallecas (just a few kilometers from Maricarmen’s eviction), the National Police carried out the eviction of David and his son. Two days earlier, Olga committed suicide in L’Hospitalet de Llobregat after being evicted.” They write that “between 2017 and 2026, more than 600,000 evictions were carried out, including both judicial and administrative proceedings. Despite the promise made by the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party) in 2019 that ‘with a socialist government there will be no more evictions without alternative housing,’ the number of evictions has remained constant. Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, between 30,000 and 35,000 evictions have been carried out annually. Seventy percent of these are related to non-payment of rent.”
Servir al Pueblo affirms the need for the housing struggle to abandon pacifism, highlighting how the State carries out violence against the people as a necessity, and how the people need to respond in kind. Servir al Pueblo concludes:
“There is no place for pacifism. An eviction is inherently an act in which the State uses violence to expel a family from their home. In this case, more than 400 people sat in front of the house to try to prevent it, but the police did not hesitate to use force to remove them. Why, then, should the people hesitate to use force to impose their interests? If big capitalists use violence against the people, the people must respond with the same violence.
History has shown time and again that rights can only be won through the force of the oppressed against the oppressors. Every right won has been wrested from struggle. Yet even today, when the situation is worse than ever, there are those who insist on making us believe that a solution can still be reached by reviving yet another social democratic project or by using the old methods of nonviolent resistance.
The housing situation is unsustainable, the people demand to fight and it is time to take to the streets, to seek new forms of struggle and to break the barrier of fear.”
Demonstrations are still going on throughout the Spanish State. In Madrid on September 26, an encampment of the Puerta del Sol was carried out after a demonstration marching through central Madrid which passed by Congress. Slogans such as “Rentiers out of our neighborhoods!”, “Rentiers are guilty, the government is responsible!” were chanted, and protective demands for tenants such as “automatic renewal of rental contracts, anti-fraud measures, and a ban on evictions without alternative housing” were made.
In an attempt to save face in response to the massive popular mobilization, Urbagestión have now offered the apartment back to Maricarmen for around 500 EUR after negotiations with her lawyer, and family members (which corresponds to around 30% of her monthly income according to her lawyer). Despite this concession, the mobilizations are still taking place, with the organizers of the encampment in Puerta del Sol making it clear that the mobilizations “go beyond this.” However, evictions remains a massive burden on the people of the Spanish State, and the popular struggle cannot rely on the conscience of monopoly capital.
