Spain’s Housing Decrees Lost in Congress, 178-172 and 184-166. Dissolving Congress Let Them Win, 35-34.
Twice this month, Spain’s 350-seat Congress voted down Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s housing decrees — 178 to 172, then 184 to 166. His response was to dissolve Congress, call a snap election for November 29, and send the identical decrees to the 69-member standing committee that handles Parliament’s business between sessions, where his coalition controls 35 votes to the opposition’s 34.
The Chamber That Doesn’t Need the Vote You Just Lost
The Diputación Permanente exists to handle urgent business while Congress is dissolved — a kind of parliamentary caretaker body. It has 68 members plus the speaker, apportioned to mirror the full chamber: 27 seats for the Partido Popular, 25 for Sánchez’s Socialists, 6 each for Sumar and Vox, and one apiece for Catalonia’s ERC and Junts, the Basque EH Bildu, and the mixed group. Run the numbers and the Socialist-Sumar bloc, with its smaller allies, reaches 35 votes against a combined PP-Vox-Junts opposition of 34 — a majority Sánchez never had on the floor of the full Congress, where Junts’ seven votes were enough to sink both decrees.
In other words, dissolving the body that rejected his housing package handed him a different body that is positioned to pass it. The decrees under review are unchanged: an eviction ban for vulnerable tenants through 2030, limits on “vulture fund” purchases below 70 percent of market value, new regulation of seasonal and room rentals, and automatic five-year extensions on rental contracts, with landlords required to give six months’ notice and pay a year’s rent to avoid renewing.
Two Losses, One Election, and a Very Specific Kind of Comeback
Congress rejected the first decree 178 to 172 and the second 184 to 166, both defeats driven by Junts, the Catalan nationalist party whose votes had propped up Sánchez’s minority government since 2023 and withdrew them this time. Announcing the snap election, Sánchez said the government needed “to renew people’s support” and to “win a much larger progressive majority,” adding, “I also know that part of that social majority is dissatisfied today.”
Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, whose Partido Popular currently polls ahead with a prospective coalition with Vox, framed the vote as a referendum on the government itself: “The question I put to voters is whether they want four more years of what we’ve been living through, or whether they want to give change a chance.” The polling he’s citing suggests a PP-Vox government would be the first to include the far right in Spain’s national government since the end of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship.
The Protests the Vote Was Supposed to Answer
The housing package followed weeks of demonstrations over rent and evictions, including a Madrid protest that drew more than 70,000 people the Saturday before the vote, after the widely covered eviction of an 87-year-old tenant. Whatever the decrees’ merits, Spain’s Congress is now in the position of having said no to them twice, only for a 69-member subset of itself to be positioned to say yes before voters get a chance to say anything at all.
The decrees are expected to go back before the Diputación Permanente on the government’s new math, then face voters on November 29 as settled law rather than a campaign promise — a sequencing that lets Sánchez campaign on policies the chamber he’s asking voters to re-elect him to already rejected twice.
Spain will spend the next eight weeks deciding whether to ratify, retroactively, a housing policy its own Parliament voted against twice, dissolved itself to get around, and may or may not still be in office to defend by the time anyone actually gets to vote on it.