The Spanish Government has approved two emergency housing decrees on September 29, after an overnight dispute between its coalition partners delayed the cabinet meeting by an hour. Neither text commands the parliamentary support needed to survive.
The first decree bars the eviction of vulnerable tenants left without alternative accommodation until 2030, a date pushed back from 2028 in the draft circulating the previous evening. It also extends by two years every tenancy contract due to expire before December 31, 2028.
The same text regulates seasonal lets and room rentals and bars investment funds from buying residential property until 2028. Ministers defined those funds by how they buy rather than by legal form, targeting purchases below market value or in blocks made solely for immediate profit.
The second decree contains a single measure, the automatic renewal of tenancy contracts, which the tenants’ unions behind a protest camp in central Madrid have demanded since September 25. Sumar, the junior partner in Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s coalition, made it a condition of approving anything at all.
Splitting the package was a parliamentary calculation rather than a policy one. The first decree was drafted to attract Junts per Catalunya and the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV), while the measures those parties reject were quarantined in the second.
The arithmetic is still unforgiving. Junts abandoned the negotiations on September 28 and the votes of Podemos are also needed, so both texts could lapse within the 30 days the constitution allows for validation. The Government has asked the Congress of Deputies to sit in extraordinary session on October 2.
An earlier housing decree was pulled from the cabinet agenda in July for want of support, one of a run of defeats that closed Sánchez’s political year without a budget. The Government had spent 1 per cent of the money earmarked for housing in 2026 by the end of May.
The immediate trigger was the eviction in Madrid of an 87-year-old tenant, which brought tenants’ unions on to the Puerta del Sol and set the deadline ministers then worked to. Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijoo rejected both decrees before their contents were published, saying those responsible for the damage would not repair it.
Spain has recorded the steepest fall in Europe in the share of young people able to leave the family home. The European Commission has appointed Dan Jørgensen as its first commissioner with a housing brief and published an Affordable Housing Plan, though supply across the European Union remains the unanswered question.
