Maricarmen changed Spain

Maricarmen Abascal should never have thought that at the end of her life she would end up unleashing a social and political earthquake. He could never have imagined that it would become the symbol of a discontent that had been brewing in Spain for some time. A court order forced his eviction from the apartment in the Madrid district of Retiro where he had lived since he was 17 years old. She was 87. It was last September 23 and the images of the eviction, on a stretcher, in the middle of a police deployment, and with hundreds of young people in the street shouting “you are not alone!”, struck a chord in this country. In the following days, the squares were filled with those who saw in that elderly woman with mobility problems a reflection of the gigantic obstacles that millions of citizens face to afford a rental, and even more so a property. The Government tried to respond to the outcry with some decree-laws that Congress rejected; This triggered an early election and the call for a general strike. Two weeks after the eviction, that previously anonymous woman died in a Madrid hospital, without having been able to return to her home and with her death becoming an even more powerful symbol, that of a serious disorder in a system that deprives so many of access to a basic right such as housing. But also in something else: the symbol of the current of solidarity and empathy in a society that seemed apathetic and disinterested in the possibility of changing things.

There is an exceptional element in the life and death of Maricarmen, and that is that, unintentionally, the dramatic episode that marked the end of her life is moving society. Without Maricarmen, we would not have seen the camping in the squares of Spain or tens of thousands of protesters demanding solutions to prohibitive rents and housing shortages. Without Maricarmen, the political class would not have suddenly begun to debate in search of answers and solutions, nor would the Government, after eight years in power, have acted to hastily approve decrees that offered an immediate response to prevent new evictions. Without Maricarmen and the defeat of these decrees in Congress, the elections probably would not have been brought forward to November 29. And without her, it is difficult to imagine that this very Wednesday, a few hours before her death, a general strike would have been called for the 11th of next month. A strike that, for the first time in democracy, did not come from the initiative of the traditional unions but precisely from the organizations that from the first moment understood that Maricarmen was the symbol that it would become. And that, for the first time, is not about salary cuts or working conditions—or not only—but about the right to housing. There was a malaise in this country that was transversal and went beyond generations and ideologies, but it took this fragile and defenseless woman to arrive for something to start moving forward.