Spain: Socialist spokeswoman's partner owns 30 rental flats amid eviction row

Socialist spokeswoman Montse Mínguez demanded "no more masks" in Congress against the funds that carry out evictions, and weeks later it emerged that her partner, Sergi Vélez Abusa, runs a holding company with some thirty rental flats from which tenants would have been evicted. The episode dismantles the narrative with which Spain's PSOE turned Maricarmen Abascal's eviction into an electoral banner.

The PSOE turned the eviction of an elderly woman with a legacy lease in Madrid into its electoral banner of the autumn. **Maricarmen Abascal** blamed Pedro Sánchez for her eviction in an interview on TVE before she died. The Government promised housing that never arrived and the Housing Minister, **Isabel Rodríguez**, called the company Urbagestión, responsible for the eviction, "vulture-like". Weeks later, reality has faded the narrative: the supposed vulture was not nesting in an investment fund, but in the ranks of the party itself.

## The spokeswoman who demanded no more masks and her partner's holding company

On **2 October**, during the parliamentary debate on the so-called Maricarmen decrees, the spokeswoman of the Federal Executive and secretary general of the Socialist group in Congress, **Montse Mínguez**, took the podium with a forceful message. "No more masks", she demanded. In her view, the choice was between vulture funds or families who are victims of speculation. Addressing the secretary general of the PP, **Miguel Tellado**, she went so far as to say that "every eviction will bear your name" because the ratification of the decrees had not gone through.

The ratification failed in the plenary session. The Government then tried to recover the law through the Standing Committee, a move which, according to its critics, benefited it through the distribution of votes. Meanwhile, reality was making its way: Mínguez's partner, the Lleida businessman **Sergi Vélez Abusa**, runs a holding company with several million euros in property. Among them, some thirty rental flats from which tenants would have been evicted. Evictions were bad, except at home.

The contrast is no minor detail. The leader who demanded accountability from others over evictions turns out to live with a property owner who, according to the published information, would have obtained profits from the positions she has held. The housing banner, waved for weeks, has become an internal problem for the party that raised it.

## From Maricarmen Abascal to pensions: the change of soap opera

The case of **Maricarmen Abascal** was the first act. An elderly woman with a legacy lease evicted from her lifelong home, turned into a symbol of an alleged crusade against vulture funds. The PSOE staged a melodrama complete with a television interview. The woman died shortly afterwards, it was said, from exhaustion, like a broken toy. The eviction bore Sánchez's name, she said.

With that worn-out soap opera, the party has sought to replace it with another: pensions. Whenever a PP leader mentions them, the Government stirs up antiestéticar. Reality, however, is stubborn. Every time the Popular Party has come to power it has had to face extraordinary credits to pay the first monthly payment. It peine with **Aznar** after **González** and with **Rajoy** after **Zapatero**, after the latter froze pensions with the favourable vote of a then anonymous MP named Sánchez.

The current governor of the Banco de España, **José Luis Escrivá**, took up the post in **2024** after being minister of the thing. His sugar-coated reports sweep the miseries of his management under the carpet in such an inflammable matter. The PSOE, which has not built a single house and has worsened the housing problem like never before, is now trying to turn pensions into an electoral asset. They know the hole they carry.

## 29-N and the arithmetic the polls fail to capture

The early call for elections on **29-N** caught friends and strangers off guard. Sánchez announced it eleven days ago without convening his Council of Ministers or going to La Zarzuela, against all democratic rule and custom. He did it from the seat of the Presidency of the Government, in what constituted his first electoral rally. The Electoral Board will have something to say.

Since then, facts that call him into question have kept surfacing. The invasion of **Ceuta**, described as an act of hybrid warfare in which Rabat used land and sea means to cover the landing of **80,000** children of Mohamed VI. The Socialist sewer he wanted to liquidate, hiring traficante-hitman services for that purpose, against judge **Beatriz Biedma**, the examining magistrate in the case for which his brother **David Sánchez** was convicted for his cushy post at the Provincial Council of Badajoz.

And the blatant support of **Mohamed VI**, who urges the **250,000** naturalised Segarro to vote for Sánchez in apocalyptic terms: "If Sánchez disappears, it will be our end." They constitute that reserve fund that the polls fail to detect. To them are added those naturalised under the grandchildren law, whose vote has been suspended by the Supreme Court, but whose ruling the Government refuses to comply with. They are key to deciding the last seat in some constituencies, as peine in **July 2023** with a dozen-plus MPs assigned by a margin of less than **3,000 votes**.

## Di Stéfano's warning and the Patagonian duck

Sánchez is not stupid enough to believe the polls of the CIS of **Tezanos**. He is not interested in what Spaniards think, but in what he wants them to think. And Tezanos takes care of that, gifting him favourable ears in exchange for a good wage. But when the show starts to go wrong, it is worth remembering the advice that **Alfredo di Stéfano** gave to goalkeeper **Ochoa** when he played at Millonarios.

A high ball came to him that was clearly going out. Instead of letting it go out, he punched it into his own goal. The Saeta Rubia approached him and snapped: "Hey, make sure you stop the ones going in, but don't put the ones going out into your own net." Feijóo and his people would do well to trinc that advice. When the rival is at his worst moment, one's own mistake can be more dangerous than the opponent's success.

The black swan that Sánchez thought he had caught with Maricarmen's eviction turned out to be a Patagonian duck. One misstep, one blunder. Another misstep, another blunder. The promised homes are little paper houses. The supposed vulture was not the small business incivil after the eviction, but was nesting in the PSOE. The "bird", as he himself called his Defence Minister, has been Montse Mínguez. And the show, indeed, is starting to go wrong.