Spaniards will vote in an early general election on Nov. 29, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced Monday in an institutional statement from the Moncloa Palace, where he took no questions. He informed King Felipe VI before going public, and an extraordinary Cabinet meeting was expected the same day to formalize the call.
The move follows a defeat in the Congress of Deputies on Friday, when the conservative People’s Party (PP), far-right Vox and Catalan separatist Junts voted down two key housing decree-laws, leaving the legislature deadlocked.
‘The worst opposition in the history of Spain’
Sánchez blamed the right and far right for blocking the measures. “We have had the worst opposition in the history of Spain, an opposition without a sense of state,” he said, adding: “We have had to fight very powerful economic elites.”
He also admitted shortcomings. “I also know that we ourselves have made mistakes and have not managed to do everything we set out to do,” he said, pointing to inequality, public services and access to housing, and calling for a much broader progressive majority “to bend the elites.”
NATO’s 5% target and the welfare state
Sánchez said his government had refused to sacrifice the welfare state “on the altar of 5%,” a reference to NATO’s defense spending target, and had worked for a better world by “supporting Ukraine, the European Union and the United Nations in their darkest moments, denouncing genocidal regimes when others remained silent, fighting tyrants, techno-oligarchs and speculators.”
Spain’s housing crisis has fueled nationwide protests in recent weeks, including a camp in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol that carried into the new week. Under electoral law, the vote takes place 54 days after the decree calling it is published.
