MADRID, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman whose eviction sparked housing protests in Spain, has died, Madrid's tenants' union said on Wednesday.
Since her eviction last month, a series of protests have included activists camping on one of Madrid's main squares and calls for action over a mounting housing crisis. Trade unions on Wednesday announced there will be a nationwide general strike over housing issues on November 11.
Those protests,along with parliament's rejection last week of decrees aimed at curbing evictions and limiting rent pressures, prompted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to call an early election for November 29.
Sanchez is seeking to shift the political narrative from his government's handling of a migrant crisis in Spain's North African enclave of Ceuta and a series of corruption cases involving his Socialist Party and his family to the housing crisis, an area in which he can harness growing resentment about rising rents.
"Now, following her passing, we are left with the example of the fight she waged and the legacy Maricarmen has left behind. And, above all, we will honor what she always asked of us: 'Fight, keep fighting for what is yours,'" the tenants' union said in a statement.
"A hug as well to all of us who feel this loss as our own today," Sanchez said in a post on X lamenting the news, while Angel Victor Torres, Spain's territorial policy minister, said Maricarmen had become a symbol of what was happening to many families as elderly and young people struggled to obtain their own homes or stay in them.
(Reporting by Pietro Lombardi, Aislinn Laing, Andrey Kalip; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Rosalba O'Brien)
