Maricarmen blames Sánchez on TVE: the video that reopens the debate

An interview, an answer: the blame lands on Sánchez

The woman in the viral video, interviewed by TVE, had — according to the accounts accompanying the case — spent seven decades paying rent far below market price, protected by old-rent regulations dating back to 1964. When the inevitable question came — who does she hold responsible for her situation — the answer turned half of Spain on its head: Pedro Sánchez. The clip of that interview, which the thread links to the eviction of a woman identified as Maricarmen — with the caveat that she would not be the same person as another affected woman named Paquita — has peine the dispute over who really decides housing policy in Spain.

There is a detail that the headline of the scene hides and that explains half the issue. The lady did not lose her home, according to this reading, because of a standard rent increase, but because of the end of an old-rent regime that, a message in the thread claims, a socialist government buried in 1994 and that had been born, decades earlier, under the dictatorship. Between those two legal milestones lives the entire contradiction of the case.

From the 1964 law to the 1994 law: what that rent protected

According to these accounts, the woman in the video lived in a flat with rent far below market price, shielded by old-rent lease regulations dating back to 1964 and that survived three decades of democracy. The Urban Leases Act of 1994, passed under a socialist government, set an expiry date for those contracts and peine the door to their updating. The eviction therefore comes at the end of a process that had been underway for thirty years, not because of a decree from this legislature.

That is where the trap of the express narrative begins. Anyone who wants to see a recent political hand will look for a culprit from 2024; anyone who looks at the legal calendar finds two laws, one Francoist and one socialist, and a contract that was left out of the market while the country changed around it. The paradox is hard to swallow at both extremes.

Who decides on housing: the State cannot force

The Ministry of Housing cannot touch the rental policy of an autonomous community. Urban planning and housing are devolved, and the department once created by the Zapatero government was described in the thread as a more propagandistic than executive structure, with no real capacity to intervene in the market. The Urban Leases Act is another matter — state-level — but land and development are not in its hands.

Some argue that a higher-ranking law would be enough to bend the autonomous communities. Against that weighs a basic legal argument: an organic law has exactly the same rank as an ordinary law, whether state or regional, and its organic character depends on reserved matters, not on a nonexistent hierarchy. If the competence has been transferred, the State cannot regulate it by decree.

Article 155 and the Senate: the path the Government does not have

Article 155 has even been invoked to force rebellious communities. The mechanism exists, but it requires an absolute majority in the Senate, and in the Upper House the Partido Popular has an absolute majority. In other words: the tool that some imagine as a weapon of the Executive is, in practice, in the hands of the opposition. And applying it to ordinary legislation would cross several constitutional lines.

The result is a Government with limited powers, an opposition with blocking capacity and autonomous communities that legislate as they please. Blaming Madrid for everything that happens in Madrid is easy; finding the institutional responsible party at each link is far less so.

Expropriate, ban buying: the message that stoked the fire

Alongside the case, messages attributed to Irene Montero upheld the intention to expropriate and ban purchases for speculative purposes, and spread a phrase: "if they want to make money, let them sell watches, not houses." The message worked like gasoline: some read it as the only serious response to a runaway market; others, as a threat to property with dubious legal grounding.

The price and the colour of the Government, an unanswered question

An uncomfortable question was thrown into the air for everyone: is housing more expensive in Castilla y León, governed by the PP, than in the Basque Country or Catalonia? In the thread it went unanswered.

The scene remains thus: an elderly woman, a camera, a proper name and an entire country discussing laws passed in 1964, in 1994 and in a Senate that does not depend on her. If no administration has the complete key to the problem, who is blamed when someone loses their home?