The general strike convened to demand the right to decent housing and wage improvements has taken hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in numerous Spanish cities, defying the heavy downpours associated with the storm 'Charles', which has battered different parts of the country.
It is the first general strike jointly driven forward by CCOO and UGT since 2012, on the initiative of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, and also the first to be held during the term of Pedro Sánchez at the head of the Government.
The call was made public on the same day that Maricarmen died, the 87-year-old woman evicted shortly beforehand in Madrid, and it takes place only two days before the official start of the election campaign and one day before the new vote in Congress on the two housing decree-laws that prompted the elections to be brought forward.
Massive gatherings in Madrid and Barcelona
According to the Delegación del Gobierno in Madrid, around 120,000 people have gathered in the capital, while the Guardia Urbana has put the number of attendees in Barcelona at 55,000. These estimates contrast with those of the Sindicato de Inquilinas, which only in Madrid raises participation to 600,000 people.
Throughout the marches in different territories, Maricarmen’s figure was remembered and slogans against rent-seeking were chanted, calling on the political parties for effective measures to guarantee access to housing.
Among the chants, familiar slogans for this kind of mobilization have been repeated, such as "qué pasa, qué pasa, que no tenemos casa", "aquí están los antifascistas" or "que viva la lucha de la clase obrera".
In addition, attendees have demanded that the cost of rent should not swallow practically the entire paycheck and have even raised the possibility of a rent strike: "A los rentistas les queremos preguntar cuánto tiempo podéis aguantar cuando todas os dejemos de pagar".
At the demonstrations, numerous banners have been displayed with silhouettes of houses to denounce the rise in housing costs, alongside others that defended the public pensions system and public schooling.
The storm 'Charles' conditions the protests
Umbrellas have marked the look of the day due to the impact of the storm 'Charles', which has brought intense rain across much of the country and has forced the cancellation of events in Cádiz, Huelva, Sevilla and Córdoba. In Cádiz, the march has been rescheduled for Sunday, 15 November at 12:00.
Despite the bad weather, concentrations have been maintained in cities such as Barcelona, Bilbao, Murcia, Palma de Mallorca, Santiago, Logroño, Valencia, Granada, Oviedo, Valladolid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Málaga, Toledo, Almería, Huesca or Jaén, where thousands of protesters have gathered.
Unions and employers’ federation: uneven readings
The general secretary of UGT, Pepe Álvarez, that of CCOO, Unai Sordo, and the spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union have defended the success of the call, although they have not provided detailed data on follow-through.
The employers’ association CEOE, on the other hand, argues that the impact has been very low and puts average participation across territories and sectors at below 5%.
"With the information available as of mid-afternoon, we can talk about a strike at the sectoral and territorial level with historically minimal demands. In short, a failure," the employers’ associations have said.
The National Federation of Associations of Self-Employed Workers (ATA) has, for its part, assured that 92% of self-employed workers have carried out their activity "absolutely normally" on this 11 November.
More than fifty detainees and nearly a thousand incidents
Although most protests have unfolded peacefully, the provisional tally from the Ministry of the Interior records at least 52 people detained and 919 incidents across the entire territory, in the period between 22:00 hours on Tuesday 10 November, when some pickets began, and 17:00 hours on the following day.
During the day, moments of tension and complaints of "police violence" were recorded, as formulated by unions after the use of pepper spray against pickets in Mercamadrid or on the Metro de Granada. At the end of the Barcelona demonstration, new incidents occurred with the throwing of pyrotechnic material.
Riot-control agents from the Police Intervention Unit have been deployed in points such as Madrid’s Gran Vía, where some shops have opted to lower their shutters out of fear of altercations. The protest in the capital ended with two arrests for assaulting authority, according to police sources.
National Police and the Guardia Civil have carried out 38 arrests: 15 in Madrid, 11 in Andalusia and six in the Valencian Community, in addition to two in Zamora and one in Navarra, Valladolid, La Rioja and A Coruña, respectively.
Various left-wing formations have criticized the police action, denouncing that some participants in the strike would have been "assaulted, fined and detained without justification," a assessment that CCOO and UGT share.