Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced on Monday that he will dissolve parliament and hold a general election on November 29. His decision came three days after Congress rejected two government housing decrees, with Junts, the People’s Party (PP), and Vox voting them down.
A change of majority would hand power to the party that tried to save Spain’s golden visa in 2024. Dissolution also wipes out every bill still moving through parliament, including one that would offer Spanish citizenship to up to 200,000 Sahrawis.
A Housing Defeat Ends the Legislature
Friday’s vote left the eviction protections and rental contract extensions in both decrees without effect. Junts, the Catalan pro-independence party that had negotiated the first text with the government, announced its opposition at the last minute.
Sánchez spent the weekend consulting ministers and senior figures in his Socialist Party (PSOE), according to multiple media reports, while housing protests filled squares across the country.
Speaking from the Moncloa Palace on Monday morning, he argued that his government needs a broader parliamentary majority to complete its reforms.
Spanish electoral law places the vote 54 days after dissolution, and November 29 is the first Sunday that fits. The prime minister has informed King Felipe VI, with the cabinet set to formalize the decision today.
Polls Point Right, With Caveats
Private polling suggests a change of government. Sigma Dos, one of Spain’s best-known pollsters, surveyed voters for El Mundo between September 22 and October 1. Its projection gives the PP 140 seats and Vox 63, against 103 for the PSOE.
Demócrata, a Spanish news outlet that covers parliament, reviewed seven recent polls and found that all of them give the PP and Vox between 201 and 213 seats combined. Governing with an absolute majority requires 176 of the 350 seats in Congress.
That Sigma Dos fieldwork closed a day before Congress rejected the decrees, so it captures none of the reaction. Spain’s state pollster, the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas (CIS), still places the PSOE first.
What Each Outcome Means for Investors
Oriol Molas, founder and managing partner of Barcelona-based Orience, cautions against reading the polls as a result, saying Sánchez “has chosen his battlefield carefully by calling the election in the middle of the housing debate, which is set to mobilize the left,” he argues, adding that Spanish elections “are often decided by a handful of seats.”
Should the center-right win, Molas would “fully expect a return to an investment-friendly agenda, including incentives along the lines of the golden visa to attract international capital back to Spain.”
He points to the party’s record: “The PP majority in the Senate already opposed abolishing the program.”
That majority vetoed the abolition on December 2, 2024, before Congress overrode it by 177 votes to 170. Spain’s golden visa closed to new applicants on April 3, 2025.
The PP has yet to say whether it would reinstate it. Its leader, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, who would likely become prime minister if the conservatives win, has made building one million homes his headline housing pledge.
A renewed left-wing government, in Molas’s reading, “would stay on its current path: more rental regulation, a tougher line on non-resident buyers and no investor visa.”
Sánchez’s proposal to tax non-EU, non-resident buyers at up to 100% of a property’s value had stalled in Congress for lack of allied votes, Reuters reported in March, and it now lapses alongside every other unfinished bill.
Did the Golden Visa Cause the Housing Crisis?
Molas rejects the premise behind the 2025 abolition.
“According to the Spanish Government’s own figures, about 14,600 golden visas were linked to real estate between 2013 and 2023,” he notes, while Spain “recorded more than 5 million home sales” over the same period.
The Housing Ministry’s count is 14,576 property-linked visas, which leaves golden visa purchases, in his words, “well below 0.5% of the market.”
Concentration was the government’s counterargument. Ministry figures assign 33% of those visas to Barcelona, 19% to Madrid, and 18% to Málaga, and qualifying purchases reached 7.1% of a single year’s home sales in Marbella.
Eighteen months on, Molas sees no payoff. Abolition “was a political signal, not a housing policy: Spain lost international capital and talent with no visible effect on rents or prices.”
“The problem is structural: Spain’s population is growing faster than its housing stock,” he adds. Any real fix, in his view, sits “on the supply side: releasing land, faster permits, legal certainty for owners and developers, and incentives for new construction and build-to-rent.”
Rejected Housing Rules Could Return Mid-Campaign
The two measures Congress rejected were decree-laws, emergency rules that Spain’s cabinet can enact on its own. A decree-law takes effect immediately, but Congress must ratify it within 30 days. On Friday it voted both down instead, which repealed them.
Approved by the cabinet on September 29, the package extended protection against certain evictions until 2030 and regulated seasonal and room-by-room rentals. It also included rental contract extensions.
Dissolving parliament does not remove the government. Sánchez and his ministers remain in office with the power to issue decrees, so the cabinet plans to approve both again on Tuesday, putting the rules back in force at once. Officials are still drafting the new texts, which will not be identical to the originals.
Ratification is the open question, since there will be no Congress to vote. That job passes to the Permanent Deputation, a 69-member committee of lawmakers that stands in for parliament until a new one is elected. Its arithmetic differs: the government would not need Junts, the Catalan party whose votes sank the originals, to pass at least one of the two.
Molas notes the rules could be “back in force during the campaign,” which he calls “more uncertainty for owners and investors.” Rent caps, he argues, “treat the symptoms, not the cause,” whereas a center-right government “is far more likely to focus on supply and on attracting investment.”
Sahrawi Citizenship Bill Must Start Over
Dissolution ends the bill that would have granted Spanish nationality to people born in Western Sahara under Spanish administration. “With the Cortes dissolved, every bill still in progress lapses,” Molas confirms.
Congress approved the text on September 10 by 168 votes to 31, with 145 abstentions. It offered nationality by carta de naturaleza, Spain’s discretionary naturalization route, to anyone born in the territory before September 29, 1977, with no residence in Spain required.
Last Wednesday, the Senate’s Justice Committee adopted nine PP amendments that removed the no-residence route. Sahrawis would instead have qualified for nationality after two years of legal residence, compared with the ten generally required.
Because of those amendments, the bill “would have needed to return to Congress anyway,” Molas observes. Now it “will have to start from scratch in the new legislature, and its final shape will depend on the new majority.”
If the polls hold, that majority would consist of the party that abstained and then narrowed the bill, plus the only one that voted against it.
PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo also pledged last month to review how Spain grants, maintains, and revokes nationality.
Routes That Remain Open
Spain’s existing residence routes do not depend on the legislative calendar.
“Spain remains open,” Molas stresses: “The end of the golden visa closed one route, but the non-lucrative visa, the digital nomad visa and the entrepreneur route remain fully available.”
Those three alternatives each lead to permanent residency after five years, though all require living in Spain for at least six months a year.
Existing golden visa holders keep their permits and renewal rights.
“The fundamentals of Spain as a place to live and invest haven’t changed,” he concludes. Whether the policy direction does is up to voters on November 29.
