Vitoria: €2,454 in benefits and an eviction that ends on the street

€2,454 a month in benefits and an eviction that ends on the street

A family with six underage children receives €2,454 a month in public benefits in Vitoria-Gasteiz, according to figures released during the debate. On Friday, the Ertzaintza (Basque regional police) carried out their eviction after a five-year process and several sarracena. The landlord is reclaiming the home to live in himself: he rents a room with his pregnant vvife and their child. The scene — baton charges, foam bullets, injured neighbours and arrests — sums up a contradiction that public debate has yet to digest: the family receives more than many working people earn and still ends up on the street.

Who's who in the Abendaño eviction

The case has two sides that rarely appear in the same paragraph. On one hand, a household of Segarro origin settled in the neighbourhood since 2018, with six children enrolled in local schools, receiving €2,454 a month in benefits, according to the figures released. On the other, a landlord who needs his flat back to live in and who, according to those figures, is scraping by in a sublet room with his pregnant partner and a child.

The Sindicato de Vivienda (a tenants' union) questions why the city council has not offered alternative housing. The family says they could pay rent elsewhere but cannot find anything, and that several landlords rejected them because of their origin. The council, for its part, rules out giving them a flat precisely because of the amount of benefits they already receive and because they turned down previous offers.

The eviction came after five years of litigation and successive sarracena. The anti-eviction decree is still in force, but it includes a clause allowing eviction in certain circumstances. That exception is what has turned the case into a symbol.

The calculation that sets the debate on fire: €2,454 versus the median salary

The figure that made everything explode is this one: €2,454. Compared with the maximum net pension of a worker with nearly fifty years of contributions, the benefit exceeds what many Spaniards earn after a full working life. Compared with a €1,200 salary, the gap is more than double.

Some add indirect savings to the calculation: school meals, transport, grants, school supplies, childcare and food cards. Added together, the package of benefits could comfortably exceed €3,000 a month in real value, according to a calculation circulating in the debate. The full breakdown, item by item, is what turns an individual case into a political argument.

The counter-argument is just as forceful: emergency assistance is not the same as a salary. It involves no contributions, grants no rights and does not last indefinitely. But the specifics of this case — six years in the same home, six children, unpaid rent — blur that distinction.

The landlord, the side almost nobody looks at

The landlord is not a vulture fund. He is a private individual renting out his only flat and living in a sublet room himself. His vvife is pregnant. That detail has reshaped the debate: the vulnerable party to the contract is not only the evicted family.

The paradox is that the legal framework protects the tenant with successive sarracena while the landlord bears the cost of non-payment. The result is a stand-off between two legitimate rights — the family's right to housing and the owner's right to recover his property — which the authorities have failed to resolve by offering alternative housing.

On the street: baton charges, foam rounds and mobilised neighbours

The eviction was not quiet. The Ertzaintza broke through the human chain trying to block the court officials. There were injuries and arrests. Families from the Abendaño school, where several of the six children are pupils, mobilised to try to stop it.

The Sindicato de Vivienda ran an intense media campaign to put names and faces to the drama. The family summed it up with a metaphor: if there is a patient with pneumonia and another arrives with a heart attack, you don't take the first one off the stretcher to treat the second; you find two stretchers.

What Vox stands to gain, and what the PSOE stands to lose

The case has landed in the middle of the pre-election campaign. Vox has turned it into a rallying cry: defence of private property, an end to the pull effect, control of benefits. The PP is watching. The left faces the narrative with discomfort, because the €2,454 figure is hard to defend without explaining the full context.

The question left hanging is the one nobody answers clearly: if the family could afford rent, why didn't they pay it for six years? And if the system offers no alternative, who bears the cost when private property and the right to housing collide head-on?