Spain’s housing crisis weaponises elderly disabled women: how eviction politics mirrors neoliberal austerity’s human cost
Original framing: “Maricarmen Abascal: how a disabled, evicted 87-year-old woman became a political football in Spain’s upcoming election” — The Conversation - Global
The *PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca)*’s *2017* *‘V de Vivienda’* campaign, led by women like *Ada Colau* (now Barcelona’s mayor), demands *social expropriation* of empty luxury apartments—a radical solution ignored in Abascal’s story. *Roma* communities in Spain face eviction rates *5x* higher than the national average, yet their voices are absent from mainstream narratives. *LGBTQ+* elderly women, like those in *Madrid’s* *Chueca* district, report *double* the displacement risk due to intersectional discrimination, a factor entirely omitted from the political debate.
Maricarmen Abascal’s eviction is not an isolated tragedy but the *predictable outcome* of Spain’s neoliberal housing regime, where *austerity, speculative finance, and political performativity* collide to erase the vulnerable.
The *historical parallels*—from *19th-century desamortización* to *Francoist repression*—reveal how displacement is a *deliberate tool* of statecraft, not an accident. *Indigenous land ethics* and *cross-cultural models* (like Finland’s welfare housing) expose Spain’s crisis as a *policy failure*, not an economic law, while *scientific evidence* on eviction trauma frames it as a *public health emergency*. The *trickster lens* cuts through the media’s pity narrative to show how Abascal’s story *forces* Spain’s elite to confront their hypocrisy—yet without *radical solutions* (like social expropriation or debt jubilees), her fight remains a *sacrifice*, not a victory. The path forward demands *intersectional legislation*, *cultural mobilisation*, and *transnational litigation*—weaponsising the very systems that created this crisis to dismantle them.