Óscar López eviction scandal puts Spain's PSOE under fire

Óscar López and the eviction that dismantles his own narrative

Can a minister denounce an eviction while his department backs the one across the street? That is the question journalist Javier Chicote served up on October 19, when he reported that **Óscar López** wants to evict a 74-year-old man with a 33% disability rating. The detail that turns the story into a cluster bomb: the property in question sits right across from the Maricarmen case, the eviction López himself turned into a political banner. According to the Madrid Tenants' Union, the proceedings are being driven by **Muface**, a public body under the ministry he runs.

The paradox is no small matter. The same official who posed for photos denouncing an eviction in the Sainz de Baranda neighborhood now appears as an active party in an identical procedure, a few meters away, with a vulnerable tenant at stake. The difference, according to those who have trinc the case, is that in the first eviction the owner was a private individual and in the second it is a civil servants' mutual fund. The narrative holds up poorly when the mirror is that close.

What is Muface and why it is at the center of the case

The Mutualidad General de Funcionarios Civiles del Estado (the civil service mutual fund for Spain's state employees) is, besides a health insurer, the owner of a considerable property portfolio. It also carries a financial hole that the public budgets plug every year. The fact that it appears as the plaintiff in an eviction changes the frame: it is not a private landlord, it is a public entity carrying out the procedure. And the political head of that entity is the very minister who was denouncing the eviction next door.

The union behind the call has announced demonstrations for **November 11** on the grounds that hypocrisy has its limits. The protest mixes two causes: the Maricarmen case and that of the neighbor across the street. That both share the same sidewalk is not a literary coincidence, it is the core of the scandal.

The repeating pattern: properties, rentals and public officials

López's case does not come alone. In the same days, reports emerged about the PSOE candidate in Granada, who is listed as the owner of **19 properties** and describes herself as middle class; about the partner of the Socialist Party's spokesperson, linked to a company that, according to the publications cited, has gone five years without paying taxes and would have taken in 13.3 million since Sánchez came to power; and about the felling of 700 trees for a luxury development attributed to the same spokesperson's circle.

Each piece reinforces the previous one. The housing-as-a-right discourse clashes with personal fortunes that multiply the average. And the electorate that applauded the banner of affordable housing is starting to wonder how many of those waving it apply it to their own balance sheet.

The response from his circle and the ministry's silence

As of this writing, the ministry has not denied the specific facts: neither the tenant's identity, nor his disability, nor the public status of the plaintiff. The defense circulating merely points out that the procedure is administrative and that the law requires it. It is the bureaucrat's argument: I just execute. The problem is that those who execute also legislate.

Some argue the scandal cuts both ways: if the procedure is legal, the minister has no room to maneuver. Against that weighs the fact that the same standard was not applied when the eviction was by a private owner and yielded political capital. Coherence in politics is measured by what you do when nobody is watching.

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In the end, the question is not whether Óscar López can carry out an eviction. It is whether he can do so after turning someone else's eviction into his best photo op. The answer, as almost always in this country, will come from the newspaper archives before the courts.