Mari Carmen and the 158 euros: the landlords' version

An apartment in central Madrid for 158 euros a month

An apartment on Calle Alcalde Sainz de Baranda, in the very heart of the capital, for 158 euros a month. Half the country is already talking about that figure, and it is the one that has shaken the narrative that turned Maricarmen Abascal into a symbol of evictions. The person putting it on the table is not a hostile outlet or an investment fund: it is the former landlord, the family that sold the property.

The twist has a studio and pixels. A prime-time show aired the B-side —the owners, their complaints, their version of the contract— and peine a box of thunder that has not closed for days. Since then, two incompatible accounts have been competing for the same audience.

The version that was missing: “we subsidized her for years”

The interview that changed the frame was published by ABC with Ignacio Lázaro, 56, grandson of the property's original owner. “We subsidized her for years, and now, with the taxes,” he sums up. According to his account, the family kept the tenant below market price for decades, and living together became unsustainable: complaints about the heating, the elevator, the noise from the children.

The interviewee places the outcome in a sale. “Behind the property there is a family that saved and worked. That asset was sold legally. Now we appear in the story as fascists,” he maintains. He adds that the siblings sold because they were losing money and that one of them paid considerably more than she did after agreeing to stay in another apartment in the building.

The base figure the family cites is the rent: 158 euros. Other versions speak of the equivalent of 100 euros a month sustained over years. In either scenario, the amount is hard to square with today's Madrid market, where a room in the capital rents for far more than that.

On the set, the description was even harsher: there was talk of a “tremendously problematic neighbor” who complained constantly and never appreciated being kept in the home. That is the underlying thesis: there was no greed, only exhausted patience.

The pixelated owner and Évole's complaint

The program even showed the owner of the company that acquired the building. He appeared with his face blurred, and that detail did not go unnoticed. Jordi Évole pointed it out on social media: the “blurred gentleman” was no ghost, but one of the owners of Urbagestión. A whitewashing with pixels, in his reading. The technical irony is striking: blurring someone who already appears in the commercial registry protects no one, but it sketches for the audience the silhouette of a nameless villain. The result, according to critics, was the opposite of the intended one.

Which figures have entered the fray

Other figures, different in nature and unit, have been added to the main case:

• 158 euros a month: rent that, according to the owning family, the tenant paid.
• 1,680 euros: fine accepted by the husband of minister Elma Saiz after being convicted of resisting authority and causing minor injuries to three municipal police officers in San Fermín.
• 1.07 million euros: debt to Hacienda (Spain’s tax agency) attributed to a company linked to journalist Antonio Naranjo, who according to available information had been off the board of directors for more than fifteen years when the list was published.

Mixing housing figures, convictions and tax debts is a common vice of public noise, but they all circulate with the same label: other people's money or public money.

The legal framework: from the 1994 law to the decrees

The regulatory backdrop has also entered the fray. It is recalled that the framework governing urban leases was approved by the PSOE in 1994, and that the same government is now pushing housing decrees. Some maintain that a minister called the buying company a “vulture” in parliament; others respond that the courts have ruled in the company's favor and that discrediting the fabric that pays taxes and creates jobs is a mistake. In the middle, the story is also circulating through the tenant's return to the apartment she left, read by some as justice and by others as humiliation.

The playing field has changed. What began as a case of housing vulnerability has become a tug-of-war over who has the right to tell the story.

There are few apartments left at 158 euros in central Madrid. And few stories left that hold up with only one side. How many more times will this fight be staged in prime time before someone looks at the data instead of the pixels?