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2026-10-06 Africa North
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'The Trap of the Great Lie.' Why Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez Dissolved Parliament
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Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
by Ilya Maximovn
[Regnum] Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced the early dissolution of the Cortes Generales (the country's parliament) after his housing decree—an emergency package of measures designed to quell public outrage over unaffordable housing—failed in Congress.
| It couldn’t happen to a more deserving Socialist. Here’s hoping the conservative and populist parties wipe the floor with them. |
Elections previously scheduled for the summer of 2027 will now be held at the end of next month, on November 29.
"I have decided to convene an extraordinary meeting of the Council of Ministers this morning to dissolve the Cortes Generales and call general elections, which will take place on Sunday, November 29, in accordance with the deadlines established by law," the head of the Spanish government said.
The protests that preceded the vote on the bill were sparked by the eviction of 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who was carried on a stretcher from the Madrid apartment where she had lived for nearly 70 years. After a change of ownership, the rent, which had remained unchanged for many years, was raised several times, leaving the pensioner unable to continue paying her rent.
Thousands of people took to the streets in dozens of cities across the country, and a tent camp was set up in central Madrid, rapidly expanding. The reason, of course, isn't just the eviction of the elderly Spanish woman, but also the country's shortage of hundreds of thousands of homes. Due to the housing shortage, rents have nearly doubled over the past 10 years, while incomes have not.
In response to the protests, the Sánchez government introduced two decrees, including rent caps, automatic multi-year lease extensions, and other measures intended to protect tenants by limiting landlord rights. Even before the parliamentary vote, rumors circulated that the date of future elections would depend on its outcome.
Housing Minister Isabel Rodríguez effectively waged an election campaign during the debate, calling on parliamentarians to decide who they were on – “with the vultures who carry out evictions, or with the people who are suffering?”
"Today you will be judged by the results of the vote; today politics and Spanish democracy will be on trial," she said.
Sánchez himself threatened the deputies: "Do the right thing, because I believe that if you don't, history will judge you sooner than you think and more harshly than you imagine." Judging by subsequent events, by history's punishing hand he meant himself.
However, on October 2, Congress rejected both initiatives: the first by 178 votes to 172, the second by 184 votes to 166. The People's Party, Voice, and Together for Catalonia, whose seven mandates were critical for the government, voted against.
The right-wing parties, which hold the majority, rightly concluded that the proposed proposals violate the fundamental principles of the concept of private property and threaten to further reduce the rental market and frighten potential investors.
Faced with the most severe political crisis of his eight years in power, Sánchez decided to go all-in. After his proposals failed, he predictably declared that the problem wasn't the bill—which, incidentally, wasn't simply rejected, but rather proposed to be rewritten—but the existence of the opposition in parliament itself.
According to him, the cabinet is faced with "the worst opposition in history, which is blocking policies that are beneficial for the country."
"The truth is that to achieve more, we need the support of the people; we need to ensure that Parliament gives us a much broader progressive majority," he said.
On the one hand, this situation is nothing new for Sánchez himself. He's accustomed to exploiting crises, including those provoked by his own government, to maintain his position through shaky political alliances.
Sánchez first came to power in 2018 and never completed his term, calling snap elections twice.
Apparently, under the current pressure, he understands that he will definitely not be able to hold on to power after the scheduled 2027 vote, so he has decided to take advantage of the escalating housing crisis to launch a final attack on the right and center-right forces in the hopes of turning the tide and finally gaining a majority in Congress that will ensure his continued power.
He's operating within his usual logic, and he's likely right about this last chance. However, a daring attempt to seize the initiative risks turning into an even more resounding failure for Sánchez than a hypothetical defeat next summer.
Sánchez called the elections at a time when both his entourage and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) were at the center of numerous legal scandals.
Begoña Gómez, the prime minister's wife, is accused of using her position to advance her career at the Complutense University of Madrid.
The Prime Minister's brother, David Sánchez, was sentenced to nine years' disqualification for misconduct in accepting a position in the Badajoz provincial council.
Former PSOE cabinet chief José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero is on trial, accused of influence peddling. And former prosecutor Álvaro García Ortiz, appointed by the Sánchez government, has been disqualified from holding public office for two years and fined for disclosing confidential information and classified data in a case.
Against this backdrop, opposition forces greeted the news of snap elections with enthusiasm. According to the leader of the People's Party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, "Spain will finally have a say" and be able to choose between "a project dictated by personal ambition and a project for the good of the country."
"The general election is not about the victory of the People's Party over the Spanish Socialist Party, but about the victory of Spain over Sánchez," he said, adding that the country had lived in the "trap of a great lie" for too long.
So far, polls have left the Socialists with little room for optimism. According to a Sigma Dos survey, the PSOE is gaining 25.6% and 103 seats—an 18-seat deficit compared to 2023. Even the hundreds of thousands of migrants hastily legalized in the spring of 2026 haven't helped.
Together, the right could secure 203 seats, with a majority threshold of 176. The left bloc—PSOE, Sumar, Podemos, and regional parties—has barely managed 114 seats, and that's without taking into account the earlier split, which means it can no longer be called united.
Therefore, there's no certainty that the 2023 maneuver, when the prime minister mobilized the left-wing electorate with fear of the far right, will be repeated. This change in sentiment is unsurprising, given that the government's overall performance can only be described as a failure.
The country's economy is officially growing, but this hasn't translated into improved living standards. While GDP is growing, household income has yet to recover to pre-pandemic levels, and quality of life indicators are now below the levels seen in 2018, when Sánchez took power. Meanwhile, the tax burden on workers is at its highest in 30 years.
The country has been without a new budget for over a thousand days, formally extending the old one from 2023. Large-scale projects, including the state housing plan for 2026–2030, are not included in the basic financial law and must be implemented through separate royal decrees, which only delays the process.
The irony is that Sánchez himself, as opposition leader, criticized Mariano Rajoy's cabinet in 2018 : "A government without a budget is a government that governs nothing." Now he finds himself in the same situation.
In addition to this, the country is being shaken by various crises one after another.
The summer of 2026 was marked by catastrophic wildfires: 60% of Spaniards rated the government's response to them negatively. Firefighters lacked the manpower to fight the blazes, resulting in massive damage to the country.
The situation in Ceuta, where around 80,000 migrants crossed the exclave's border in 48 hours at the end of July, remains unresolved.
Thousands of illegal immigrants are occupying the city, forcing local residents to stay home or form self-defense units to patrol their neighborhoods, while police are only able to herd the newcomers in droves from one overcrowded detention center to the next, with no results.
Now, on top of all this, protests related to the housing crisis are being unleashed, which is what led to the dissolution of parliament. The argument goes that if parliamentarians aren't responding to the public aspirations expressed in the government's bill, then they must be somehow flawed and need to be replaced.
A consistent pattern emerges throughout this story: no matter what happens, Sánchez always finds someone else to blame. In Ceuta, Europe failed to help (and Russia somehow "harmed" it); the housing crisis is blamed on vulture property owners; the budget paralysis, on the right.
So now the time has come for the fiery Spanish socialist's main weapon: populism. The housing crisis has given him a new pretext for attacking the right, whom he dubbed "elites, tyrants, techno-oligarchs, and speculators" who "must be broken."
At the same time, although the government's position is quite shaky, the opposition is calling for a premature victory. "There's no need to fight over something before it's too late. Polls said the same thing in 2023, and yet Sánchez and all his allies still managed to form a majority," said Voice party leader Santiago Abascal.
And the right does have reason to be afraid – among the protesters, there are many who swallowed the bait thrown by Sánchez and believed that his housing problems could be solved at the cost of restricting the rights of other Spaniards.
And even if they fail to win the elections legally, the left, judging by their rhetoric about the "confrontation between the people and the vultures," is already preparing a time bomb, dehumanizing property owners and thereby preparing a section of society for a rebellion that they can exploit.
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Posted by badanov 2026-10-06 00:00||
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