Pedro Sánchez has called a general election for November 29. From La Moncloa he asked for a new majority to carry on reforming Spain, having informed King Felipe VI beforehand.
The official reason is housing. On October 2 the Congress of Deputies rejected two housing decree-laws — rent caps, an extension of expiring tenancies and a ban on evicting vulnerable tenants — with the People’s Party (PP), Vox, Junts and Unión del Pueblo Navarro (UPN) against. The first fell by 178 votes to 172.
That is the version the Spanish Government wants carried into the campaign: the roof over your head is what somebody else blocked.
The arithmetic says something simpler. A government that cannot carry a decree cannot carry a budget, and Junts had already walked.
What the date really outruns is the calendar of the courts. Begoña Gómez, the Prime Minister’s wife, has been sent for trial before a popular jury; his brother David was disqualified for nine years by the Badajoz court; two former organisation secretaries of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán, sit at the centre of the public contracts investigation known as the Koldo case.
Then there is the ley de nietos, the grandchildren’s law. The Supreme Court has suspended, as a precautionary measure, the Spanish vote of those naturalised under the 2022 Democratic Memory Law unless the exile of their ancestors is certified one file at a time.
The scale explains the interest: nearly 600,700 applications approved to August 31 and some 369,017 beneficiaries already entered in the consular registries that feed the overseas electoral roll.
The government says no police inquiry into fraud is open. The PP says the PSOE and Sumar tried to shield the mechanism through an amendment slipped into an education bill.
Ceuta is the other file that does not close. Since the mass crossings of July 30 the city has been under a royal decree declaring a situation of interest for national security, in force until December 31 — that is, through polling day.
Thousands of migrants remain on its streets and the government has no returns agreement with Rabat to show for it.
The street is not his either. The encampment in Puerta del Sol belongs to a tenants’ union that is working towards a general strike, and it marched on Congress rather than for the author of the decrees.
A campaign can change a subject. It cannot change a case file, an electoral roll certified name by name, or a border.
