By Pietro Lombardi and Corina Pons
MADRID, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose dramatic eviction last month sparked mass housing protests in Spain that ultimately led to an early election, has died, Madrid’s tenants’ union said on Wednesday, provoking an outpouring of grief and anger on the streets of the capital.
Abascal had been in hospital since her eviction on September 23 from her home of more than 70 years, when police and social workers removed her by stretcher.
Since then, protests have included activists camping out on one of Madrid’s main squares and calls for action over a mounting housing crisis including a shortage of homes and surging rents.
Following the news of Abascal’s death, thousands marched from the square, Puerta del Sol, towards parliament, chanting: “This is not a death. It’s a murder!” A cause of death was not announced.
Trade unions on Wednesday announced there will be a nationwide general strike over housing issues on November 11.
The protests, along with parliament’s rejection last week of decrees aimed at curbing evictions and limiting rent pressures, prompted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call an early election for November 29.
Sanchez is seeking to shift the political narrative from his government’s handling of a migrant crisis in Spain’s North African enclave of Ceuta and a series of corruption cases involving his Socialist Party and his family to the housing crisis, an area in which he can harness growing resentment about rising rents.
“Now, following her passing, we are left with the example of the fight she waged and the legacy Maricarmen has left behind. And, above all, we will honor what she always asked of us: ‘Fight, keep fighting for what is yours,'” the tenants’ union said in a statement.
Sanchez posted on X, lamenting Abascal’s death. “A hug as well to all of us who feel this loss as our own today,” he wrote. Angel Victor Torres, Spain’s territorial policy minister, said Abascal had become a symbol of what was happening to many families as elderly and young people struggled to obtain their own homes or stay in them.
(Reporting by Pietro Lombardi, Corina Pons, Aislinn Laing, Andrey Kalip; Editing by Andrei Khalip, Rosalba O’Brien and Cynthia Osterman)
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