We are experiencing a turning point in the social response to the housing crisis in the Spanish state. After years of mobilization by anti-eviction platforms and tenants’ unions, popular power has gathered enough strength and energy to push the government to respond.
The eviction of Maricarmen, an 87-year-old woman with a disability who had spent years fighting to remain in the flat where she had lived all her life, was the final straw in a series of systematic abuses against the working class by landlords and speculators. The news spread around the world and awakened the anger of millions of people. The mass demonstration on 26 September, called by the Madrid tenants’ union, ended in an occupation in Sol that has now been holding out for almost two days and continues to grow, strengthened by the convergence of struggles resulting from yesterday’s mobilizations for public education.
This Tuesday, Congress is debating a housing decree that is already informally known as the Maricarmen Decree. The Madrid tenants’ union is demanding that it include three key measures to effectively protect the right to housing: 1. automatic renewal of rental contracts; 2. a ban on evictions without a housing alternative; 3. anti-fraud measures.
More and more people are joining the occupation in Sol, and new protests are being called throughout the Spanish state. We assume our responsibility to change the world and join the mobilizations for housing based on horizontality and solidarity. We reject learned helplessness, the myth that we have no power and cannot change anything, and we draw inspiration from the historic struggles that secured human rights such as the right to housing, which are now being taken away from us.
We take to the streets and squares, supporting grassroots movements in order to build counter-power against the major investment funds and a government subjected to capital. The struggle for housing is the struggle for dignity, the struggle for life and the struggle for a fairer world. The time is now. No one will do it for us.
