Spain's PSOE and its long history of housing U-turns

The PSOE ended old-rent regulation in 1985 with the Boyer decree, but kept existing contracts in place, and since then it has alternated tenant-protection rhetoric with measures favourable to the property market. That ambivalence explains much of its later swings, from the 2023 housing law to the Asval landlords' association.

The history of housing in Spain has two dates that explain almost everything: 1964 and 1985. In 1964, the Franco dictatorship passed the Urban Lease Reform Act, a text that left prices virtually frozen and turned many leases into lifetime tenancies, inheritable by relatives on the same terms. In 1985, Spain's first socialist government of the democracy did away with the old-rent regime through the Boyer decree, although it respected contracts already in existence. Between one date and the other there is a political fight, a resignation after 57 days and a mansion in Puerta de Hierro that is still used as a joke and as a diagnosis.

## 1964: a frozen, inheritable rent

The sentence that opens the 1964 Francoist reform sounds like a social economics manual: "The liberalising movement of urban property must be tempered, not only by the pace set by the country's economic circumstances, but also by the unavoidable demands of social justice, which constitute the marrow and reason for being of our political regime." It was not revolutionary sloganeering. It was the gateway to a highly protectionist law for tenants, with rents left practically frozen and contracts that could last a lifetime. More than that: they could pass to relatives on the same terms after the holder's death. The result was a stock of cheap, ageing, blocked rental housing that for decades operated as a de facto right for some tenants and as a sentence for landlords unable to update prices.

That design was no accident. In late Francoism, two political families clashed. The old Falangist family defended a social protectionism that kept forced lease renewals in favour of tenants and accepted gradual revaluation of old rents. The new technocratic family, more liberal, wanted to get the building industry moving, open up the market and modernise the economy. The technocrats won the general war but lost specific battles such as the one in 1964. The old-rent regime survived the development years, the transition and the first years of democracy. It became an awkward inheritance: it protected many voters, but prevented the rental market from functioning as such.

The paradox is that the end of that regime came from a socialist government. It was not the dictatorship that buried lifetime leases, but Felipe González's PSOE. And it did not do so without internal conflict. The 1985 reform was quite similar to that of 1964 in one respect: it set in motion a political machine mixing ideology, internal power and long-term economic consequences. The regime and the names changed, but the pattern repeated itself. One part of the party looked to the vulnerable tenant; another looked to the market, to landlords and to investors. That tension was never fully resolved.

## 1985: Boyer, Guerra and the end of the old-rent regime

In May 1985 the socialist government pushed through two far-reaching reforms. One affected pensions: the contribution period required to access a contributory pension rose from 8 to 15 years. The other touched rentals: the Boyer decree ended low lifetime rents, except for contracts that already existed. The architect of both was **Miguel Boyer**, Minister of Economy. Facing him was **Alfonso Guerra**, Deputy Prime Minister and guardian of the party. Boyer won the battle. Boyer lost the war. **57 days** after killing off the old-rent regime, he resigned.

The fight was not merely technical. Boyer wanted to strengthen his power with an economic deputy prime ministership. Felipe González first said yes and then said no. The then director of the **CESID** (Spain's intelligence service), **Emilio Alonso Manglano**, wrote in his diaries, collected in the book *El jefe de los espías*, that Boyer could not carry out his economic policy without handling powers. When Alfonso Guerra found out that Boyer might be given the second deputy prime ministership, he said that if that peine, he would leave. A government crisis was served. The rental reform was the visible trigger of an underground struggle for economic control of the Executive.

There was more. Before Spain knew that Boyer and **Isabel Preysler** were involved, the deep state already knew. The couple used to meet in an apartment set up in the attic of the Ministry of Economy, where Boyer sometimes spent the night. In the days before the rental and pension reforms, someone tipped off Felipe González about the affair. The prime minister asked for discretion: he wanted no scandals or internal tensions, and he knew there were people in his own house who would rejoice at Boyer's downfall. According to **Juan Luis Galiacho**'s book about the relationship between the minister and the socialite, that someone was Alfonso Guerra. The tip-off could destabilise Boyer's liberal agenda and upset the balance of power.

The Boyer decree was presented as an inevitable modernisation. It also drew immediate criticism. Two presidents of Madrid neighbourhood associations gave a grim assessment in **El País**: it was not good policy to cut users' rights and protections off at the root, because it triggered huge rises in land prices, construction and financing costs, and tax burdens. Time proved part of their diagnosis right, although the underlying problem remained the same: a small, strained rental market full of perverse incentives. Boyer left the ministry, but his decree stayed. And so did the feeling that the PSOE could pass a harsh reform and, at the same time, sell itself as protecting those at the bottom.

## Villa Meona and felipismo's aesthetic turn

When the relationship between Boyer and Preysler was made official, the label *beautiful people* triumphed to describe the glitzy turn of the socialist elites. Few things stung felipismo's cultural image more than seeing the minister who had ended the old-rent regime buy himself a mansion worthy of an old Hollywood star. The most famous house of the democracy was called **Villa Meona**. It was in **Puerta de Hierro**, still under construction in the late eighties. The magazine **Tribuna** published the floor plans, leaked by **José María Ruiz-Mateos**, Boyer's arch-enemy, after paying off the architects' circle. The fact that spread like wildfire was that the house would have **16 bathrooms**. Boyer appeared before the press to deny it. According to the former minister, it did not have 16 bathrooms: it had "only 13".

The anecdote would be just that, an anecdote, were it not because it summed up a change of era. Galiacho recounted that Boyer's reaction was out of character: he seemed like an expert architect fine-tuning floor plans. What irritated him most was the figure of sixteen bathrooms and that his bedroom was over **400 square metres**. The works were finished in **1992**. The mansion sat on a **5,000-square-metre plot**. When the first photos were published, **Hola** described it with a risky euphemism: "It is a large house, but at the same time intimate." The reality was less intimate: **44 rooms**, **15 washbasins**, **seven bidets** and several heated dog kennels. Beyond the grounds, four live-in maids, a cook, three chambermaids, a chauffeur, a gardener and four security guards.

The symbolic impact was enormous. The PSOE that had come to power with a working-class aura now appeared linked to a luxury mansion, to a minister who had ended cheap rents and to a social life that had little to do with the left's narrative of 1982. No need to exaggerate: the party kept winning elections and governing. But distrust of its ability to regulate the property market for the benefit of the social majority began to take hold. Boyer's house became a symbol of the double estimulante ilegal: one sail to the people, another to the market. That image would return every time the PSOE promised rent caps, evictions freezes or controls on investment funds.

## From the 15M to Asval: the recent ambivalence

Housing sociologist and professor at the University of Zaragoza **Daniel Sorando** argues that the relationship between governing socialism and housing has had two phases in the democracy. A lighter one, coinciding with the golden age of the two-party system. And a harsher one, coinciding with its crisis. In Spain, he explains, there has been a very broad social pact since the fifties around housing as the central asset of families. Between Francoism and democracy there was no transition in housing matters. Until **2008** there was a rigid, dominant bloc around turning workers into homeowners, at the cost of preventing public housing from becoming consolidated as another pillar of the welfare state. A clear example was the tax relief for home purchases, which the PP and PSOE kept until **2013**, and whose effects still linger.

From 2008 onwards, with the financial crisis and the ripple effect of the **15M** movement, the PSOE began to change its discourse, pushed by very young social movements in favour of the right to housing, which found interlocutors in parties to the left of the PSOE. In the current context, the policies a PP and Vox government would implement would be, according to Sorando, diametrically opposed to those pushed by the governing coalition, under pressure from the housing movement. The eviction of **Maricarmen**, who held an old-rent contract, has forced the socialist government into new contortions between leftist reform and market pragmatism. Its flagship decrees have fallen by the wayside. Too much polarisation to craft a housing decree vague enough to please **Junts** and **Podemos** alike. Much noise and few nuts before an electoral outcome.

The key, says Sorando, lies in the social make-up of the socialist electorate: older and more made up of homeowners than that of the parties to its left, which are younger, made up of tenants and residents in pressured areas. Young people have been largely excluded from the social pact around home ownership. Their parents and grandparents antiestéticar their assets will lose value, a value they want to bequeath or convert into resources to pay for care in old age. Young people cannot access that wealth, except in the upper-middle classes. While the parties to the left of the PSOE brought numerous housing-rights activists into the electoral cycle of the 2010s, the PSOE is more sensitive to market operators, who recruit figures from the party.

That last point has a name. Shortly after **Pedro Sánchez** arrived at Moncloa (the prime minister's office), **Asval** was founded, the Association of Rental Housing Owners. It is nominally made up of small landlords, but steered by large investment funds such as **Ares**, **Castlelake** and **Blackstone**, Spain's largest landlord, with more than **20,000 properties**. Asval would be something like the anti-Tenants' Union, the main driving force behind the Sol camp. All its presidents so far have been former senior socialist officials. The first was **Joan Clos**, former mayor of Barcelona, who now runs the other big landlords' association, **Fiabci**. The second president should have been **Isabel Pardo de Vera**, former Secretary of State for Transport and former chair of **Adif**, but something got in her way.

Pardo de Vera had been the number two of the ministry that processed the **2023 Right to Housing Law**. During its passage she was opposed to putting a cap on rental prices. Asval wanted her because they saw her as professionally very capable and politically very valuable for her good relations with Moncloa's top brass, as **El Confidencial** reported. When the hire leaked, public opinion reacted badly. Moncloa hinted there could be a conflict of interest and Pardo de Vera threw in the towel. Who ended up as president of Asval? **Helena Beunza**, Secretary General for Housing in Pedro Sánchez's first government. The association later called for the withdrawal of the two housing decrees with which the government wanted to put out the fire of Maricarmen's eviction. "The social shield cannot be the landlord," she concluded.

The 2023 housing law was presented with euphoric rhetoric. The then minister **Ione Belarra**, of Podemos, announced that suffering an eviction with no housing alternative was over, and that evictions of vulnerable families without an alternative were banned. Pedro Sánchez highlighted the "historic milestone" of moving from "predatory urbanism" to affordable renting. The data, however, are stubborn: rents have risen **21% on average** since then. The regional governments rail against vulture funds, the government says it is aligned with them, but the legislature is expiring and youth brick-throwing rage is at its peak. The Science Minister and candidate for the Valencian regional government, **Diana Sarracena**, announced an anti-vulture-fund plan for **Valencia** shortly after the government rejected a state law against those funds. The Housing Minister, **Isabel Rodríguez**, owns three homes. In property matters, the PSOE's left hand does not know what the right hand is doing, or if it does, it pretends not to. None of this is legal or property advice; for a specific case, consult a professional.