canary islands housing crisis election

Housing crisis dominates Canary Islands pre-election debate

Compiled with the help of artificial intelligence, based on Spanish-language information. Source below the article.

Housing crisis takes centre stage in the Canary Islands

The housing protests that erupted in Madrid following the eviction of Maricarmen, together with the failure of the housing decrees in the Congress of Deputies, have brought forward the general election and made housing the central issue of the pre-campaign — in the Canary Islands as much as anywhere else.

Coalición Canaria, a party that had been fiercely critical of the Spanish housing law and of the state government’s decrees, decided to support the first of them. It later announced it was taking the necessary steps to declare Las Palmas de Gran Canaria a stressed housing zone — two years after the city council, then governed by PSOE, Nueva Canarias and Podemos, had requested it.

Political parties are well aware that housing is the main concern for the public, as confirmed by the CIS (Centre for Sociological Research). Frustration at the difficulty of accessing a home has led to mass protests in Gran Canaria, Tenerife and Lanzarote, where encampments and demonstrations have been held and which will culminate in a general strike planned for 11 November.

Canary Islands government opens public consultation on stressed zone

In the midst of the protest wave, the Canary Islands government, through its Ministry of Public Works and Housing — led by Coalición Canaria — has announced that the file relating to the stressed zone application will be put out to public consultation this October. The public information process lasts at least 20 days and, once completed, the objections submitted will be analysed, which will require a report from the city council. Only once all these formalities have been completed will the regional government decide whether to declare the requested area a stressed residential zone.

It is worth remembering that in June this year the President of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo, said that if the conditions were met, he would accept Las Palmas de Gran Canaria city council’s request to declare the city a stressed residential market zone, but in his view: “It will be of no use whatsoever.”

In this connection, the PSOE MP Patricia Hernández has tabled a question in the Canary Islands Parliament asking the regional government this Tuesday to confirm whether it “still does not believe that there is any area in the Canary Islands worthy of being declared a stressed residential market zone”.

Coalición Canaria fast-tracks protected housing in Gáldar

The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria file is not the only announcement Coalición Canaria has made: this very weekend it declared “urgent” the processing of the file for the construction of a second development of 26 publicly promoted protected homes and 26 parking spaces in Gáldar, Gran Canaria.

The party’s candidate for Congress for Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Cristina Valido, listed housing as one of her party’s priorities in Madrid. Coalición Canaria’s Organisation Secretary and Canary Islands MP David Toledo will take to this Tuesday’s plenary session the question of how “to make effective the limitation on the purchase of housing by non-resident citizens in the islands”, a demand that Clavijo’s party wanted to include in state housing initiatives.

PSOE pushes for a ten-year housing plan

The PSOE also wants to respond to this public outcry over housing through the pre-campaign and through institutions such as the Parliament, where it is already promoting a new ten-year housing plan for the Canary Islands. The aim is that “once and for all”, according to MP Elena Máñez, the regional government includes in its budgets a provision for the housing supplement of the Canary Islands citizenship income — a requirement set out in the mechanism approved by the “pact of the flowers” government, which has still not been implemented.

“An election has been called in which we will decide what model of society we want to live in,” Máñez said in remarks this Saturday, contrasting a society that recognises the elderly Mari Carmen Abascal — evicted from her home in Madrid a few weeks ago and the driving force behind the social protests that followed — with one in which a minute’s silence for her death is refused in institutions governed by the PP and Vox.

Another question the PSOE is putting to scrutiny the CC-PP government is what “concrete result it can offer on the serious problem of access to housing suffered by families, young people and workers in the islands, after thirty-eight months at the helm of the government”.

Opposition demands action as PP brings immigration back to the fore

Nueva Canarias, which expects to finalise a left-wing alliance in the coming days for the 2026 general election, is asking in Parliament “whether the government intends to adopt effective measures to respond to the public outcry demanding a policy of protected and affordable housing, expressed by thousands of people in the Canary Islands, or whether it will continue to allow the speculative market and vulture funds to decide the future of housing in the archipelago”. In addition, the party led by Luis Campos has tabled the Canary Islands Bill for the Guarantee of the Right to Protected and Affordable Housing.

On housing, the PP has requested the appearance of the Housing Minister, Pablo Rodríguez, to give a stocktake of the measures adopted by the Canary Islands government during this parliamentary term “to increase the supply of public and protected housing, mobilise land and speed up the construction of new homes”.

However, the Popular Party is once again stirring up public debate with immigration, and this Sunday its parliamentary group sent a press release echoing Vox and calling on the Spanish government to “deploy the armed forces” to control immigration. PP MP Jacob Qadri will defend this initiative at the next plenary session of the Canary Islands Parliament, according to a statement. The Congress of Deputies nevertheless already rejected on 15 September a proposal from the far right along the same lines concerning Ceuta and Melilla. At the time, the PP showed its support for processing the initiative from Santiago Abascal’s party, which failed to secure enough backing.

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