Madrid: Spanish workers have voiced their fury at rising prices and soaring rents in a general strike that brought thousands of people onto the streets to demand better wages and government services.
The union action shut down or scaled back services across the country during a day of mass rallies in every major city, leading to sporadic confrontations between protesters and police.
Workers jammed the main thoroughfare of Madrid to march through the central shopping district with banners calling for action on salaries, housing and prices – the three issues likely to decide a general election on November 29.
Consumer prices and rents have outpaced wages across Spain for the past decade, while house values have surged due a shortage of new properties, putting home ownership increasingly out of reach for young people.
“We have to fight because we need lower prices,” said Rebeca Castaño, a teacher at an infants’ school who marched with her colleagues in Madrid.
Castaño told this masthead that some of the children in her school lived in homes where their families had to cram four or five people into a single bedroom because housing costs were so high.
“The government needs to limit prices. They have to spend more on social housing.
“And they have to make a law to stop the tourist flats because in the city centre all of the flats are being used for tourists.”
Anger over housing costs has turned the Spanish people strongly against the use of Airbnb and similar services, with a recent survey finding that 79.2 per cent of voters believe vacation rentals a contributing “a lot or quite a bit” to higher rents.
Unions estimated that four million workers turned out for the rallies across the country on Wednesday (early on Thursday AEDT), suggesting that close to 8 per cent of the population took part in the first general strike in 14 years.
Frustration over the cost of living has spread across Europe and fuelled protests in Portugal, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany and other countries over recent months. While media attention has focused on riots and looting in France , similar clashes have been seen on a smaller scale in Belgium and Italy.
The protests in Spain have focused on housing after widespread outrage at a property company that evicted a disabled pensioner, Maricarmen Abascal , 87, from her apartment in September. She died in hospital weeks later.
While the protests over the treatment of Maricarmen – as she is now known across Spain – led to government vows to limit rent increases, ordinary households are dealing with a decade of upward pressure on housing and other costs.
House prices rose 84.6 per cent over the decade to 2025, while average wages increased 27.9 per cent over the same period, according to figures from the National Statistics Institute cited by Euronews .
One young protester told this masthead the government should freeze prices and take other action to ensure young people could afford housing.
She held a sign saying: “We are not slaves. We want to live, not just survive. Our rights must be defended.”
Another protester, Maribel Moreno, said housing was becoming “impossible” and public services were suffering from a lack of investment.
“We are not here just for salaries, but for other things also – for housing, for education, for healthcare,” said Moreno, an office worker for the Madrid Metro.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has held power since 2018 as the leader of the Socialists, but he is trailing in the polls behind the conservative People’s Party and its leader, Alberto Nunez Feijoo.
While Sanchez defeated Feijoo at the last election, in 2023, the latest survey by polling firm SocioMetrica found there had been a net transfer of 832,000 voters from the left to the right since its previous survey.
If the People’s Party combined with the hard-right Vox party, the polling firm forecast, the bloc would win about 200 seats of the 350 seats in the lower house. This would put the conservative side comfortably ahead of Sanchez and the Socialists with 108 seats, according to the results reported in Spanish newspaper El Español .
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