Renters versus rentiers: A new class divide in Europe?

Fifteen years ago, mass demonstrations across Spain culminated in thousands of people occupying Madrid’s central Puerta del Sol square. The Indignados movement helped inspire mobilisations across Europe and Occupy Wall Street by pitting the “people” against the “casta”, the “one per cent” or the “elites”. This political division was then adopted by the populist parties on the left and right that greatly upended the political establishment.

 On the 26th of September, echoes of 2011 returned. After the forced eviction of Maricarmen, an 87-year-old woman who had lived in her Madrid home for 70 years, thousands marched through the capital and hundreds set up camp in Puerta del Sol.

As the Indignados movement did back then, this housing protest has identified a clear adversary: rentiers. The new political divide pits renters against rentiers, struggling tenants against landlords. There is a clear social basis for this division, as homeownership becomes increasingly unattainable and more households are pushed into renting, while the share of landlord households – those owning additional properties to generate rental income – has increased by nearly 300% over the past two decades in Spain. Will this new mobilisation help normalise this new political and class divide, as happened 15 years ago?

Two conditions are necessary. First, the movement must endure. The past 15 years have produced what some scholars call “hyperpolitics”: highly politicised societies that mobilise rapidly but struggle to sustain organisation and pressure. As issues quickly emerge and fade, no stable political divides can form. Yet these protests have been organised by the Madrid Tenants’ Union, an increasingly prominent organisation that could provide an organisational base and make this mobilisation more durable.

The second is whether these protests will spread across Europe, as the Indignados’ protests did. Housing affordability elsewhere in Europe is no better than in Spain, and it has already become a decisive issue in several European elections. Housing provision is arguably the greatest European policy failure of recent decades, yet the EU – until recently – played little meaningful role in the field. The conditions for a continent-wide housing movement are therefore present. History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes. The coming weeks will show whether it does so again.

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