Spain's middle class can no longer afford housing or a car

The middle class can no longer afford a home or a car: the figures that give it away

In a village on the Costa Brava, not a single apartment of 70 to 120 square metres is for sale. The only visible listings are villas worth over a million euros that nobody buys. That anecdote, which could well be the tip of the iceberg, explains what OECD statistics fail to capture: Spain's middle class is not dissolving merely because of relative income, but because it no longer has access to the goods that once defined it.

The OECD defines the middle class as households with a disposable income between 75% and 200% of the national median. By that range, Spain would still have a considerable middle class. But that methodology never asks whether an ordinary worker can buy a home, a new car, or support a family on a single salary. And that is where reality diverges from paper.

The contrast with the seventies and eighties is stark: a factory worker could buy a flat, a car and raise two or three children on a single wage. Today, that same profile often needs the grandparents' pension to make ends meet. The debate over who funds what —whether pensions are the safety net holding up the young or a burden suffocating the economy— remains open, but nobody disputes that the purchasing power of the average wage earner has collapsed.

Meanwhile, car sales figures show the other side of the paradox: registrations rose 3.7% in July, with 101,949 passenger cars sold. Who is buying them? Critics point to rentiers and speculators, while the ordinary worker insists they cannot keep up. To add insult to injury, Barcelona is subsidising the purchase of electric bicycles with 400 euros: 2,000 people will benefit in 2027, with an annual investment of one million euros. From the house and the car to the e-bike, one observer summed up with irony.

The political explanations vary. Some blame the productive model and membership of the "German neo-periphery" without productivity; others blame the speculation and rent-seeking that buys housing as an investment; there are also those who point to migration policy as a pressure factor on demand. The truth is that there is no consensus on the diagnosis, and the only agreement is that the middle class is shrinking by feel, not just by income.

Perhaps the most unsettling figure is that of car registrations: if people cannot afford cars, who is buying the 101,949 passenger cars sold in July? Either the statistics measure an ever smaller segment, or the middle class as defined by the OECD is no longer the one on the street. As one analysis asked in the public debate: when did it become normal for us to grow poorer every year? It is not a flaw, it is the goal.