The essential question

If we set aside the shouting, the demagoguery, the emotionality, the threats from neofascist groups and parties, and the pre-election maneuvers of all political parties, the essential question remains. And the essential question is that the right of people to decent housing is a basic right, also constitutional in the Spanish state. A right, therefore, prior to other rights, such as that of property. Prior or superior, let's call it whatever you prefer. The right to decent housing is also prior or superior to the law of supply and demand. As jurist Joaquim Bosch has explained, in many European countries an eviction like Maricarmen's would not have been possible because their laws prioritize the right of people to remain in their homes. We are talking about countries like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, or Denmark, recognized communist and Bolivarian fiefdoms. But as Bosch says, putting market law before the right of people to decent housing leads us only to the dominion of another kind of law: the law of the jungle, where only the strongest prosper. (In these countries, even if their police forces were as beastly as any others on other occasions, a new episode of police brutality would have been avoided, with agents beating the protesters who were demonstrating against the eviction).Every citizen has the right to a decent home; no one has the right to accumulate houses for speculation. This applies to vulture funds, but not only to them. Vulture funds displace market logic towards its most illiberal extremes, where capitalism becomes the dark reverse of liberalism, and in this displacement move all the actors that operate in the real estate market. Not long ago we spoke of large landlords, a way of referring to companies or individuals with a portfolio of homes that they use to exploit them under the logic of maximum profit. Tourist rentals (to which a huge number of small owners, many of them also left-wing voters, immediately subscribed) is another abuse that must be eradicated. Why? Because it only obeys the right to property and the law of supply and demand, while it infringes upon people's right to have a decent home. Because it inflates a price bubble that makes people who should be able to afford it (Maricarmen with her pension, for example) unable to pay for an apartment, not even the one where they had lived their whole lives.

Some find it caricaturesque that people are going back out to camp like they did during the 15-M movement. But the true caricature, and a very perverse one at that, is that of the real estate sharks who find it appropriate, or even funny, to leave people out on the street so they can conduct their dirty business: it is, specifically, the caricature of the fat rich man, with a cigar and a top hat, and vampire fangs. That the mobilization is sparked by a particular case like Maricarmen's does not imply any contempt for the rest of the people suffering the same drama, but rather their recognition. Anyone who knows who Rosa Parks was can understand that immediately.