MADRID — Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced Tuesday that his government will deploy four thousand civil servants to move into Spain's most expensive rental apartments and simply stay there until landlords agree to freeze prices, calling the operation «the most literal interpretation of a housing decree ever attempted in a democracy.»
The officials, drawn from the ministries of Housing, Transport and Agriculture, will receive air mattresses, portable desks and a laminated card reading «I am the law of supply and demand now.» They began moving in at dawn, with the first wave occupying sixty buildings in Madrid's Salamanca district and another forty in Barcelona's Eixample. «We are working against the clock,» Sánchez said at a ceremony in Getafe, «but also against the landlord, who has a key and a lawyer. We have neither. We have numbers.»
By midday, the Ministry of Housing had converted three parking garages into dormitories and hired a fleet of food trucks to circle the occupied blocks. Neighbors reported that civil servants were already forming committees to decide who gets the balcony and who must sleep near the boiler. «It is not ideology,» Sánchez insisted. «It is humanity with a mattress.»
Opposition leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo called the plan «a squat with payroll» and demanded the government at least issue the officials matching pajamas. Sumar threatened to send its own volunteers unless the decree included free breakfast, and by evening the first landlord had reportedly offered to lower the rent by two hundred euros if the civil servants would just stop singing the national anthem at 7 a.m.