Death of evicted 87-year-old intensifies Spain's housing crisis ahead of election

María del Carmen Abascal was 87 years old and had lived in the same Madrid apartment for seven decades when the eviction notice came. On September 23rd, police cordoned off her street. Demonstrators gathered to stop what was about to happen, but officers removed them from the scene. Images from that day showed Abascal, who used a wheelchair, being carried from her home on a stretcher—a photograph that would travel across Spain and beyond, turning a single eviction into a national reckoning.

She died three weeks later, on a Wednesday in early October, after being hospitalized following the forced removal. Her cause of death was not disclosed. By then, the real estate company that had initiated the eviction—seeking to rent the apartment at a substantially higher price—had already reversed course under public pressure, agreeing to let her return. She never got the chance to go back.

Abascal's death arrived at a moment when Spain was already convulsing over housing. Rents had climbed beyond what ordinary people could afford. Families were being pushed out of neighborhoods they had lived in for generations. The anger had grown loud enough that Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, unable to move emergency housing legislation through Parliament, had called for a snap election scheduled for November 29th. The political ground was already shifting beneath the government when Abascal died.

What happened next showed how completely her case had come to embody the crisis. Demonstrators gathered outside Spain's Parliament and in Madrid's Puerta del Sol square. Some stood in silence for a minute. Others chanted: "Maricarmen lives, the fight goes on." Housing activists seized on her death as proof that the system was broken—that it was not just about numbers and policy, but about real people losing their homes, their stability, their lives.

Both Sánchez and the opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo issued statements of condolence. Sánchez wrote of his love for her family and his sense of shared loss. Feijóo, from the conservative opposition, urged political leaders not to weaponize her death, not to turn her into a campaign tool. "When faced with the death of a person, we must only show respect," he wrote. The plea itself was telling—it acknowledged that in the weeks ahead, as Spain moved toward its election, Abascal's name and her stretcher and her empty apartment would become contested ground.

What made her case resonate so widely was its clarity. She was not a statistic. She was a woman who had lived in one place for seventy years, who had roots so deep they seemed immovable, and who had been moved anyway. The real estate company's decision to reverse the eviction came too late. The apartment remained empty. The housing crisis remained unsolved. And Abascal became the face of what happens when a system prioritizes profit over people who have nowhere else to go.