Maricarmen Abascal: How a Disabled, Evicted 87‑year‑old Woman Became a Political Football in Spain’s Upcoming Election

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

By Dolors Palau-Sampio, Full Professor of Journalism, Universitat de València

In Spain, an average of 44 evictions are carried out every day. While statistics like this are shocking, numbers alone rarely spark a revolution. Mass protest movements instead tend to rally around one compelling individual story.

This was exactly what happened with 87-year-old Maricarmen Abascal, who has become so famous that she is known in Spain as simply Maricarmen. Following an insurmountable rent hike and a lengthy legal battle, she was evicted from her Madrid home of 71 years in September, and died on October 7. She quickly become a household name, and the figurehead of Spain’s housing protests.

Her case stirred the empathy of millions, and inspired collective shame that society was unable to prevent an elderly woman from being forced out of her home on a stretcher. Her story made headlines around the world, sparked a wave of fierce, nationwide protests, and led to an unravelling of Spanish politics that has culminated in a snap election on November 29 and a general strike planned for November 11.

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But polarisation in Spain runs deep. While one section of society has embraced Maricarmen as a figurehead, another sees her as a target, a threat to be confronted. As the EU-funded PLEDGE project argues, emotions signal underlying grievances, and can either strengthen democracy or undermine it.

Political parties, partisan journalists and some mainstream media outlets – from the supposedly moderate or liberal right to the far right – have turned public debate on the right to housing into a hotbed of hostility. Maricarmen, the symbol of this struggle, has become an object of ridicule for conservative media and politicians.

Just hours after her eviction, Spanish newspaper OK Diario ran an editorial headlined with the stage name of a ventriloquist who shares her name, and who used to perform with a puppet representing an elderly woman.

It was a heavy-handed suggestion: Maricarmen was a puppet of the left, and was being used to divert attention from the government’s handling of the migrant crisis in Ceuta. Similar narratives have since been repeated in dozens of articles and television debates, in an attempt to discredit the woman who inspired the protests and, by extension, undermine the movement itself.

Media attacks

Shortly before Spanish right wing rejected decrees intended to ease the housing crisis, several media outlets set about dissecting the life of a pensioner who had become a household name just a few days previously.

Right-wing outlet ABC interviewed Maricarmen’s former landlord, in which he criticised her for living on subsidised rent. Meanwhile, El Español devoted a feature to a string of unrelated attacks on her character.

By the final days of her life, these conjectures had become widespread. Some outlets passed outright judgement: one outlet proclaimed that “The vulture is Mari Carmen”, a reference to the “vulture” investment fund that hiked her rent by 230% (complete with a misspelling of her name in the headline).

Sections of the Spanish press have even cast themselves as the ones setting the record straight. One headline published shortly after her eviction flatly stated that “Maricarmen is a chancer (and someone had to say it)”.

Attacking the movement

Polarisation makes it easy for attacks to spill over from Maricarmen herself to the protests and encampments in solidarity with her. Much of this hostility plays on assumptions and prejudice.

Outlets such as OK Diario portray the encampment in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol as an unsanitary space run by left-wing radicals in the service of squatting and indoctrination. La Razón points to the presence of knives, paving stones and vandalism at the encampment, warns of a possible scabies outbreak, and plays on classist prejudices about bad smells to stigmatise progressive organisations and their supporters.

The Objective, meanwhile, has scrutinised the wealth of people at the encampment. La Razón has run similar pieces that cast the movement as frivolous champagne socialists as putting on a show.

Madrid’s regional president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, has also weighed in, calling the protesters “terrorists”.

On October 12, hundreds of far-right protesters – some waving Francoist flags and making fascist salutes – attempted to enter the camp in Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square, and had to be held back by riot police.

The housing election

With housing set to dominate the coming elections, political parties on all sides are doing everything they can to capitalise on Maricarmen’s legacy.

The left arguably has the upper hand on this front, and is making use of it – the emergency housing decree that the right voted down in late September was informally dubbed “the Maricarmen Decree”. However, some sections of the right are also trying to claim her as their own.

Just hours before Maricarmen’s death, far-right party Vox used her name to raise the spectre of immigrants enjoying privileges denied to Spaniards, with a post on X stating “If Maricarmen had been ‘Morocarmen’, she would have got social housing”. “Moro” is a derogatory Spanish term for North Africans.

Vox MEP Hermann Tertsch has even called for an autopsy on Maricarmen, fuelling a conspiracy that the government had her killed to help their campaign gain momentum.

People’s Party (PP) leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo, currently the favourite to win the November election, has struck a more sober tone but has still accused Sánchez of trying to “manipulate the emotions of the Spanish people”.

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With seven weeks until the election, encampments continue across the country, and there is broad union backing for a general strike over housing on November 11. However, the same right-wing outlets that ridiculed Maricarmen now accuse progressive forces of exploiting her death, branding their campaign obscene, manipulative and necropolitical.

One thing is clear though. The political and media battle surrounding Maricarmen has conveniently eclipsed the core issue that led Pedro Sánchez to call a snap election in the first place: the state of Spain’s deeply broken housing system, and how to fix it.

(Wc/AR)

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