Car plants, container ports and city buses all felt it on Wednesday as Spain held its first general strike in 14 years. Called jointly by the country’s two biggest unions, UGT and CCOO, and backed by tenants’ groups, the 24-hour stoppage started at midnight with one central demand: fix a housing market that has priced a generation out.
The numbers behind the anger are stark. Average rents have nearly doubled over ten years. Renting a modest 50 m² flat in the capital now swallows roughly €1,170 monthly, Idealista data show, nearly everything an under-30 earns, by the national youth council’s reckoning. The Bank of Spain puts the housing shortfall at roughly 750,000 homes and expects it to top a million by 2028.
By the organisers’ own early count, nine in ten workers stayed away on car assembly lines and docks, and production stopped entirely at plants run by VW near Pamplona and by SEAT in Catalonia. Hospitals, clinics and mail delivery were much less affected, with turnout there reported at well under half. Not everything stayed calm: pickets and police clashed outside the Mercamadrid wholesale market, where CCOO said 13 people needed treatment, and burning tyres blocked roads in Barcelona. On top of that, weather warnings for gales and heavy rain from two Atlantic systems put the planned afternoon rallies at risk.
It all goes back to one case that shocked the country: Maricarmen Abascal, aged 87, lost her Madrid home to an eviction order in September and passed away shortly afterwards. Weeks of protest camps followed, and when parliament threw out government decrees meant to curb evictions, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election for 29 November.
That timing makes the strike politically charged. Sánchez insists it is “not a strike against anyone”. Employers’ associations and both right-wing opposition parties, PP and Vox, accuse unions of effectively campaigning for the government.
