It has been just over two months since Raúl Moreno (Barcelona, 1978) has been at the head of the Department of Social Rights. ARA interviews him for the first time since he took office as minister at the Ramon Berenguer nursing home, in Santa Coloma de Gramenet.

Everyone to the polls. Pedro Sánchez has put an end to the rumors by announcing the end of a legislative term that will be high-stakes until the very last moment. His government had long since lost the majority to approve relevant projects, and the Moncloa was holding out, waiting for the ideal moment to challenge the right-wing parties, the clear favorites to govern from now on. In the PSOE, they believe the moment has arrived with the housing crisis and that they are prepared to face the elections with guarantees. How are the parties arriving at this call to the polls?

Many small landlords, who make up the largest proportion of the housing market, are skeptical about the decree approved by the Spanish government, which faces a vote in Congress this Friday. Of the two housing decrees, the one including measures for the protection of vulnerable people was, in principle, the one that seemed most likely to move forward, especially after the 'yes' announced by Podemos and the PNV. But the rejection by Junts —which is asking the Spanish government to withdraw it or they will vote against it— has disrupted the possibility of it passing. The second one, which incorporates automatic lease extensions and compensation for tenants, had no chance, because the PNV will also vote against it.

The Spanish government is optimistic, but the fact is that, 48 hours before the vote on the housing decrees in Congress, they still do not have guaranteed support. Neither for the first decree-law, with a broad battery of measures such as the suspension of evictions and tax incentives –already published in the BOE–, nor for the second, which automatically extends rental contracts, which will be officially published this Thursday. For the moment, the Spanish government only counts on the affirmative vote of EH Bildu and Esquerra, as announced by its president, Oriol Junqueras, although the spokesperson in Congress, Gabriel Rufián, has said that they will look at it down to the "last comma". Meanwhile, Junts, Podemos and the PNV maintain the uncertainty. In fact, it is with these two parties that the Spanish government has to perform the most juggling acts to satisfy their demands, which are very often contradictory. In parallel, the Tenants' Union has demanded that the groups validate both decrees.

The death of Olga, an evicted resident of L'Hospitalet de Llobregat who committed suicide on September 7th, has brought me suddenly, head-on and in tears, back to November 2010. Almost automatically, like a sudden spring of memory. On November 11th of that year, Miguel committed suicide, also in L'Hospitalet, shortly before being evicted. So far and yet so close, between the houses where Olga and Miguel lived there is only a kilometer or so, fifteen minutes on foot and 15 years and 10 months of distance. Connect the dots, because in between there are thousands of evicted families –400,000 in the Catalan Countries–. Even if only descriptively, politically geolocated, it must be added that in November 2010 Catalonia was governed by a formal left-wing tripartite. Today, an informal tripartite. In between, everything has happened and everyone has passed through, here –Mas, Puigdemont, Torra, Aragonès, Illa– and there –from Rajoy to Sánchez–. I say this because between both deaths, what has not changed one bit is the immobilism in housing matters, whoever was governing and with the relevant nuances. But everything is terrifying and leaves us hollowed out, when time never passes in vain. In 2010, the stock of protected social housing in Catalonia did not reach 2%, well below the European average of 15%. In 2026 we are still there: 1.7%. At the tail end of the EU and on the podium of daily evictions. 15 little years and nothing has happened here. Or perhaps it has. Rearrange the chairs: between now and 2040, in the Barcelona area alone, 50,000 protected housing apartments will be lost. And that explains so many things; too many things, perhaps; or maybe all at once.However, of the things that have indeed changed –and for the worse– I fear that the most savage is to reveal how the legitimization of cruelty, the apology for social sadism, the indifference towards the suffering of others, and the aporophobia that so criminalizes poverty have grown exponentially. A growth that also takes a demoscopic and electoral form, with the rise of the extreme rights that condense all their courage into the manifest cowardice of always blaming those who are most screwed for everything. White bullets for black balls. There are those who even –without knowing any detail of the case, as if they were at a bar counter– have wanted to opine gratuitously about Olga's death, pretending to decouple the eviction from the suicide and describing the informative link as "journalistic irresponsibility". I will spare myself from delving into the high doses of mean-spirited insensitivity, but it had been a long time since I saw someone so misinformed talking about misinformation and informing us so punctually of their brutal misinformation. The person who said this is the vice-president of a newly born and singular Federation of Neighbors presided over by hotelier Joan Gaspart. All of this ties in with one of the most symptomatic data points from the latest CEO, where response and voting orientation are crossed when asked "if one can almost always trust people". 41% defend it. Those who defend it the most are not the voters of Vox, PP, and AC and, in the face of all the dead ends and difficulties, they believe this is a civil war of all against all. On the other side, there are those who know that, in the face of all the difficulties and the same dead ends, there is nothing more than the democratic possibility of life in common.

The years I lived in the United States I witnessed firsthand the existential distress that it means for many people not to have public health coverage as we have in Europe or in Canada itself. Even with a health insurance policy linked to a payroll, the fear of many workers is that, if a cancer or a serious accident comes or they die, they will be ruined, they or their loved ones, because the mutual insurance companies do not always play fair with the fine print. Our distress over housing is looking more and more like the distress of North Americans over health.

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 individuals 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 us call it as you prefer. The right to decent housing is also prior or superior to the law of supply and demand. As the 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 individuals to remain in their homes. We are talking about countries like Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Denmark, recognized communist and Bolivarian fiefdoms. But, as Bosch says, placing market law before the right of individuals to decent housing only leads us to the rule of another kind of law: the law of the jungle, where only the strongest prosper. (In these countries, even if their police forces are as beastly as any others on other occasions, they would have spared themselves a new episode of police brutality, with officers 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 to speculate with them. This applies to vulture funds, but not only to them. Vulture funds shift the logic of the market towards its most illiberal extremes, where capitalism becomes the dark reverse of liberalism, and in this shift move all the actors that operate in the real estate market. Not long ago we were talking about large holders, 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 an enormous 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 attacks the right of people to have a decent home. Because it inflates a price bubble that means that people who should be able to afford it (Maricarmen with her pension, for example) cannot pay for an apartment, not even the apartment where they had lived their whole life.

The pressure on the streets for the Spanish government to approve the new housing decree to curb evictions has increased this weekend. The citizen mobilization has been an indisputable success. As the promoters of the demonstration and the encampment at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid have said themselves, it cannot be compared to the 15-M of 2011. There is less underlying ideological movement and more concrete demands. In reality, the current cry has a perfectly describable objective: to resolve access to housing, which has become the main cause of precariousness and inequality. And it responds to a very generalized malaise that is interclass and intergenerational. The image of Maricarmen Abascal, 87 years old, being evicted on a stretcher from the apartment where she has lived all her life, has made an impact on public opinion: many elderly citizens have imagined themselves in her situation, and many young people and adults have projected their own grandmother or mother onto her.

Maricarmen Abascal in Madrid; Olga, the 54-year-old woman from l'Hospitalet who committed suicide after being evicted... The list is terribly long. Although the total number of judicial evictions is lower than it was a few years ago, it remains a problem, a scourge. And what is most serious is that when a measure has been attempted to be applied, even if temporary –such as the decree to prevent the eviction of vulnerable people–, a group of parties, such as the PP, Vox and Junts, opposed it.

Two years ago, one of the spokespersons for the Madrid Renters' Union, Valeria Racu, uttered a sentence that—though we didn't know it at the time—these days we remember with sadness. It was a program of Espejo público that began with the story of a pensioner named Maricarmen, the owner of an apartment whose tenant had stopped paying rent and was subletting the rooms. After acknowledging that, undoubtedly, it was a difficult situation, Racu asked to talk about another Maricarmen: "A Maricarmen I know […], who is facing eviction because a company has bought her building to invest in it".

What happened in Madrid with Maricarmen Abascal, evicted at 87 from the apartment where she had lived her whole life and which she had paid for religiously, is unspeakable. Even more dramatic is the suicide of Olga, 54, a mother of two daughters, which took place in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat. The housing crisis today marks a precariousness that no longer only affects the most vulnerable, but also the middle class, with the youth collective especially left without options that go beyond family support. The right to housing is a fundamental right, but the harsh reality is that more and more people do not have it guaranteed: when this affects the elderly or children, the problem, as a society, shames us.

In the film Umberto D. (directed in 1952 by Vittorio de Sica, a director who dared to portray poverty, and starring Carlo Battisti) there is a very harsh scene. The protagonist of the film is a retired civil servant who cannot survive on the meager pension he has been left with and who finds himself pushed to beg on the street. Because he is ashamed, the man leaves a little dog with his hat, which begs for him. At first glance it is a tender image, but if one stops to think about it even for a moment, it is devastating. It portrays the poverty of so many people who never imagined they would find themselves driven to it and who do not know how to face the situation, because they cannot overcome the astonishment – and the shame, too – of finding themselves in it.The market, left to its own logic without any kind of correction, tirelessly expands the spaces of marginality or makes the poverty threshold higher and higher, so that an increasingly broad sector of the population falls into it. People who in principle should be in a position to afford a dignified life (wage earners or self-employed, or those who retire after contributing throughout a long working life) discover all of a sudden that this is not the case. Their incomes are below prices, and if they do not have an environment that supports them, they soon find themselves driven to poverty.This week, the cases of Maricarmen in Madrid (the 87-year-old woman, in poor health and with low income, who was evicted from her home while protesters were repressed in a new episode of police brutality) and Olga in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat (a 54-year-old woman, mother of two daughters –one of them a minor–, who committed suicide because she could not bear to lose her home), have filled newspapers, television news and social networks, and have drawn everyone's attention to the so-called housing crisis, which in reality is nothing more than a result of an economic system based on two things: greed and aporophobia. Put another way: the pathological relationship with money that consists of considering it a superior good (in relation to the rights of citizens, and also in the abstract, as a kind of deity), and the hatred of the poor.People have, or we have, a fear of being poor for many reasons, but one of the main ones is that we know we will come to be hated. Not just belittled, ridiculed, humiliated, violated, or persecuted: but also hated. Above all else, hated. The image of the poor person acts as a reflection of what we never want to be: that is why, when we encounter them on the streets, we turn our heads or quicken our pace. No one will reproach us for it. The poor person is fearsome, dark, and repugnant, because they personify the negation of prosperity. The message for those who cannot pay the prices imposed by uncontrolled speculators is that, in addition to their home and their belongings, they have lost their dignity and the consideration of a human being. The poverty-stranglers have always existed; now, however, they boast of being the leaders of the new capitalism. They have many self-justifying theories, but a single fundamental principle: to hate the poor.

The eviction of Maricarmen, an 87-year-old Madrid resident who uses a wheelchair, has shaken the entire State. The case of this elderly woman has become symbolic due to her vulnerability, and the protests, which this Wednesday gathered in front of her building to try to prevent her from being thrown out of her home, have had political repercussions. The parties to the left of the PSOE have not been slow to demand a new housing decree from the Spanish government. Sumar, the minority partner, is asking for it to be approved at next week's council of ministers and for it to include, among other things, the expropriation of Maricarmen's apartment from its owners, the investment fund Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión S. L. But they are not enough for the package of measures to move forward in Congress. Pedro Sánchez needs the votes of all the parties in the investiture bloc and that includes Junts. After the breakdown of the relationship with the socialists, the residential emergency has brought negotiations back to the playing field.

A 54-year-old woman, a resident of the Santa Eulàlia neighborhood in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, has committed suicide five months after being evicted from her home. This Monday, organizations and residents of the city publicly denounced the suicide of Olga on September 7th, five months after losing her home despite suffering from diagnosed mental health problems. She was 54 years old and had two daughters, one of whom is still a minor, and the night before the eviction she had already expressed that she was considering taking her own life. "We do not accept that Olga's case be presented as an inevitable tragedy without anyone responsible," stated Pau Segura, spokesperson for Habitatge l'Hospitalet.

Since last Wednesday, if Txema Escorsa, 34 years old and a struggling secondary school teacher, is still in his home, at Sant Agustí street in Vila de Gràcia, it is because that day, very early, an anonymous crowd, shoulder to shoulder, prevented the judicial procession and judicial device from carrying out the task of kicking him out of his home. Everything stopped at street level and via a human wall, and this is called social unionism, civil disobedience, and community defense. The undeniable evidence clarifies, with lights and shorthand, that the eviction was only blocked by the massive mobilization of the people. That is to say, Txema was saved by the popular initiative of the Tenants Union and not by any calm and severe political, judicial, or police decision. And that the president of the Generalitat even sent a tweet of support – although it will take more than a tweet. The battle against the global market is always local and the image showed hundreds of neighbors against a foreign vulture fund located in New York, which violates and breaks current legislation and which is impudently making prohibited colivings for room rentals, to which it already charges per room much more than Txema pays for an entire apartment. Paradoxically, the main representatives of the speculators were, last Wednesday, the judge and the police – that is, the institutional system – who came to accelerate the expulsion of residents. And from here the creature cries. The judicial procession has left in writing that it will try again on April 15th. The people, undoubtedly, will too. The same day that Txema was resisting at his home thanks to active neighborhood solidarity, Barcelona City Council decided to take advantage of it to evict 130 impoverished people from a vacant lot in La Sagrera. Without any prior notice and without offering them any alternative other than to get out and disperse them throughout the city. Everything happened –words and deeds of urban eloquence, in which the name never makes the thing– under the protection of the alleged Pla Endreça and next to, wouldn't you know it, the Pont del Treball Digne, which the expelled do not have in the open. However, the Quart Món entity was there supporting them. These days a municipal campaign supposedly denounces the uncivil "scoundrels". But what is "shameful" is that the shantytown returns to the city –53 settlements with 299 people as of December 2025– and that so "little" is done to reverse it. Or that the little that is done is to drive them away to an even worse place. Scoundrels, indeed. After all, here in Barcelona as in Badalona, we should insist much more that the different management and narratives –the packaging and propaganda– in no case alter the final product: the abandonment of the kick in the backside. The effect ends up being the same, whether with Albiol's aporophobic shouting, or with Collboni's apparently sanitizing neutrality. One and the other confuse the fight against extreme poverty with the fight against the poor. And that's how we are. Thanks to all the entities involved for years in the fight for the eradication of homelessness, from the Fundació Arrels to the Hospital de Campanya of the parish of Santa Anna. A civil network that has been crying out for years for a law of transitional and urgent measures, still in infinite process and pending approval.

The social safety net measures, which were rejected in Congress on Thursday by the PP, Vox, and Junts parties, protected 60,000 vulnerable people across Spain, some 13,000 of them in Catalonia. One of them is Francesca Cervelló. This 63-year-old resident of the Putxet neighborhood in Barcelona has been dreading this day for months. "What will I do now? What will happen to me?" she asks in a conversation with AHORA.

Another defeat for the Spanish government in Congress. The lower house approved a 2.7% increase in pensions this year (only Vox voted against it), but rejected, for the second time, the social safety net decree and the decree promoted by the Minister of Social Rights, Pablo Bustinduy, which would have allowed the Spanish government to limit the prices of goods. Both measures were defeated by the votes of the PP, Vox, and Junts. "Be clear that people will take note [of your decision] and they have long memories," said Bustinduy.

We'll finish this now. immersion in the 23-F which has been going on for days, not without highlighting the irony of fate that it means Tejero died yesterdayPrecisely. Today is the day of reckoning (the final tally). Winners: Pedro Sánchez, who, by declassifying these documents, has steered the political conversation for almost a week and it's worked out brilliantly for him. Winner: Juan Carlos de Borbón, who appears as someone who stopped the coup, with two very large asterisks: they haven't declassified the conversations the king had on the afternoon of the coup with the various captains general of the military regions, and therefore we don't know if he was testing them out; and second, we'll never know if in the days before the king hinted that he would be willing to support what was called "a change of course." Otherwise, nothing new, beyond rubbing our eyes at the fact that a diagram, a schematic that looks like something a primary school student would draw, showing several possible coups, has been kept confidential.

The social safety net decree, which will be voted on in Congress this Thursday, hangs by a thread. In fact, at this point, nothing suggests it will pass, because the Spanish government doesn't have enough votes secured. Junts has stated it will vote against it, or at least that's what the party's spokesperson in Congress, Miriam Nogueras, indicated during Wednesday's question time with the Spanish government. "We will vote no," Nogueras affirmed, criticizing Pedro Sánchez for including the anti-eviction measure in the decree again. "Social safety net yes, squatting no," Nogueras said. Thus, Pedro Sánchez's government is once again headed for another defeat for the package of measures. Government sources are avoiding commenting on this scenario and are simply saying they are waiting for Thursday's vote.

The pressure has had no effect. The PP and Junts have rejected the pension increase and the anti-eviction measures in Congress. Although both parties agreed with the first initiative to update pensions, the fact that it was included in the same decree as the second, which they oppose, led them to vote against both. The criticism they received from the left during Tuesday's plenary session of the Lower House and the pleas from housing groups, who marched to the doors of the Lower House to demand the approval of the legislation, did not change their initial positions, which had already predicted this outcome. the first parliamentary defeat of the Spanish government this 2026. Vox also voted against it. Conversely, the Spanish government has passed the decree creating a single transport pass for the entire country and maintaining public transport subsidies amidst the railway crisis. Juntos voted in favor, and the Popular Party abstained.