By Mireia Merino and David Latona
MADRID, Oct 7 (Reuters) – Trade unions in Spain on Wednesday announced a nationwide general strike over housing issues for November 11, a protest that will take place a few weeks before a snap election in which rising rents and evictions have become campaign topics.
The country’s two largest unions, UGT and CCOO, said they had agreed on the date, although it still needs to be formally ratified by other unions in a meeting later on Wednesday. It will be the first general strike jointly backed by Spain’s two largest unions in 14 years.
The strike will be the latest in a series of demonstrations provoked by the eviction of an 87-year-old woman in Madrid, with activists camping on one of the capital’s main squares calling for solutions to a mounting housing crisis.
Those 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 believes he can harness growing resentment about rising rents.
Spain has a deficit of about 750,000 homes, which is set to grow to more than a million by 2028, according to the Bank of Spain.
With fewer people able to afford a home, renting has increased sharply, putting pressure on that market. The average rental price of €1,176 ($1,315) is equivalent to about 98.7% of a young person’s average monthly salary in Spain, according to the Youth Council of Spain.
“We cannot ignore the fact that housing is where most of our wages go. What is the point of raising the minimum wage if housing costs are rising three, four or five times faster?” said Tenants’ Union spokesperson Valeria Racu.
($1 = 0.8946 euros)
(Reporting by Mireia Merino and David Latona; Editing by Charlie Devereux and Xevi Fontdegloria)
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