Sunday morning broke over the Puerta del Sol — the zero kilometre, the belly button of Spain, the grand ceremonial slab of Madrid — and there, spread across the paving stones like some bivouac of the dispossessed, stood one hundred and fifty tents. Not your alpine expedition jobs, mind you: camping tents, borrowed tents, the sort of tent you haul to a festival, pitched where the street artists and the lottery sellers and the coach loads of tourists usually conduct the peculiar commerce of the capital. Overnight counters had logged around a hundred; after 8am, new structures kept sprouting. The new inhabitants had passed the night on yoga mats, in sleeping bags, in some cases flat on the cold hard ground itself, while small knots of them sat up talking, talking, talking into the early hours — and the Civil Guard and the National Police kept their constant unblinking watch over the whole encampment, and the campers, for their part, reported a calm night and laid in stocks of food and water to keep the thing running for days.
The name. You hear it everywhere in the camp, repeated from group to group like a password, a benediction, a battle cry compressed into seven syllables: “all this is for Maricarmen.”
Seventy years, one notice
Maricarmen Abascal is eighty-seven years old. She had lived in the same rented flat in Madrid’s Retiro neighbourhood — the Retiro, the park-and-palaces district! — for seventy years. Seventy years of rent paid, of keys worn smooth, of a life stacked inside four walls. Last Wednesday she was forced out. The eviction detonated in the Spanish imagination; they are already calling it the “Maricarmen effect,” and by Saturday a protest day organised in 40 cities was marching under the slogan “Not one more Maricarmen.”
The Madrid march set off at 6.30pm from Sol and wound down to the Congress of Deputies, and here the arithmetic goes hazy in the time-honoured fashion of all such events: the Government Delegation counted around 25,000 marchers, while the Tenants’ Union — it was the Madrid Tenants’ Union that called the whole mobilisation — counted as many as 300,000. Somewhere between those two numbers walked families and the young and organised gaggles of the elderly, an intergenerational river of indignation, chanting: “Where is the progressive Government?” and “We want to see Maricarmen come back.”
When the march ended in the early hours of Saturday, the Union’s call went out: don’t go home — camp. Bring sleeping bags, mats, food, water. Hence the tents. Hence the yoga mats. Hence, perhaps, the faint and unmistakable whiff of déjà vu hanging over the square, because Spaniards of a certain age have seen this film, in this very theatre.
Back to the future of 15-M
In March 2011 — the camp began on the 15th — the Puerta del Sol went feral for the first time, tents and megaphones and human microphones, and the occupation metastasised into the 15-M movement, the indignados, the roar of a generation fed up with Spain’s two great alternating dynasties of power, the PSOE and the PP, demanding a political alternative that would put ordinary people first. Its slogan, “Sí se puede” — yes, we can — outlived the encampment and seeded a party, Podemos, which stormed into parliament and coalition. History does not repeat, but it does occasionally pitch its tent in the same square.
all this is for Maricarmen
The man handling the megaphone this time is Gonzalo Álvarez, spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union, who slept at the camp and surfaced on Sunday to explain the theory of the thing in a live interview: the protest is after “structural changes,” he said, so that housing “is treated as a basic necessity and not as a financial asset.” Maricarmen’s eviction worked as the catalyst, he said, because of “the injustice, the harshness of what happened and the police response.”
The ‘Maricarmen decree’
And now comes the brass tacks, the hard procedural core at the centre of the sleeping bags: a decree. The Government is due to consider a housing package on Tuesday, and the Union — which has helpfully pre-named it the “Maricarmen decree” — wants it to include, among other measures, a freeze on rents. Approve it or else. The or else is not vague: Álvarez warned that if the decree fails, the Government’s left-wing partners, Sumar included, should consider withdrawing their support and bringing the whole edifice down. His colleague Alicia del Río went further still, calling Maricarmen’s case a “point of no return” in Spain’s housing struggle and declaring that if the decree does not pass on Tuesday, the Executive “makes no sense at all” and must rethink whether it can continue.
Hovering over the scene, part elder sage and part ringmaster, is Pablo Iglesias — the ponytailed founder of Podemos, himself one of the initiators of 15-M — who pronounced the grand formulation: Maricarmen, he said, could become Spain’s Rosa Parks, and he hoped the movement would spread across the country. The Rosa Parks of the Spanish rental market! The comparison is the kind of thing that makes ministers’ offices reach for the antacid.
Because the left, naturally, is also fighting itself. That is the permanent basilica of Spanish progressive politics: the sacred space where allies kneel to disagree. Podemos MEP Irene Montero has rejected the Government negotiating the decree with Junts — the Catalan party whose votes keep the coalition breathing — accusing it of trying to force an agreement on the people who marched on Saturday. Montero wants something far more maximalist: the expropriation of 650,000 homes owned by vulture funds, to be converted into social rental housing. Six hundred and fifty thousand! Meanwhile Ione Belarra, the Podemos secretary-general, promised her party would keep “piling on the pressure” for the strongest possible decree — while warning that no single measure, however strong, would crack the housing crisis without continued protest and pressure from the streets.
So the tents stay. The yoga mats stay. The food and water stocks are counted and guarded. The police keep their watch, the campers keep their calm, and over the whole square hangs a deadline no one in Madrid can dodge: Tuesday. The Government sits on Tuesday to decide the fate of the Maricarmen decree, and the people in the tents of the Puerta del Sol — the heirs of 15-M, the avengers of an 87-year-old from Retiro — have announced, in so many tents and so many words, exactly what they plan to make of it.