There is something almost mystical about the way Pedro Sánchez’s government deals with the economy.
It is that unshakeable faith in the idea that reality is optional and that a royal decree can bend the laws of supply and demand as easily as folding a napkin at the Moncloa restaurant.
The masterpiece of Iberian socialism, the Ley de Vivienda, is a hymn to the optimism of the will against the pessimism of numbers.

The miracle of San Pedro: turning houses into ghosts

The idea is of disarming, almost childish simplicity: ‘Do rents cost too much? Let’s forbid them to cost too much!”.
It is the same logic as if, in order to beat the summer heat, you decided to prohibit the thermometer from exceeding twenty degrees. The thermometer will mark twenty degrees, sure, but you will still sweat like marathon runners in the Sahara.

In Spain, the ‘ceiling’ to rents has rapidly become the ceiling of an isolation cell.
The average homeowner – who in the collective imagination of the radical left is a sort of cross between Scrooge McDuck and a James Bond villain, but who in reality is often a pensioner rounding up the minimum – did the only rational thing possible: he ran away .

Thousands of flats in Madrid and Barcelona have evaporated from the long-term rental market faster than a glass of sangria left in the sun.
They became tourist rentals, holiday homes, or simply stood empty, protected by a thick blanket of dust and the owners’ fear of becoming entangled in armoured contracts and impossible evictions.

The ideal tenant: a unicorn with three paychecks

The sarcasm of fate is that laws made to ‘protect the weakest’ always end up biting them in the calf. Thanks to Sánchez’s roof, finding a house in Barcelona today is no longer an economic transaction: it is a papal audience.
As supply is minuscule and demand is oceanic, the owners have raised the bar for selection to Olympic levels.

Today, to rent a thirty-square-metre hole in the Gràcia district, a security deposit is no longer enough: you need a family tree certified by the land registry, proof of financial blood purity, three bank guarantees and, possibly, a kidney as collateral.

The precarious student, the honest immigrant or the young couple that Sánchez swore he would save are the first to be rejected. The ‘cap’ has created an elite market where those who already have everything win. Congratulations, Pedro: you have turned renting into an exclusive club for the bored rich.

Buenos Aires: welcome to the fairground of freedom

While in Europe we scramble to right all the wrongs of mankind by legal decree, on the other side of the ocean a man with the hairdo of a 70s rock singer in an identity crisis has decided to set fire to the handbook of the ‘good statist ruler’.

Javier Milei arrived at the Casa Rosada not with an election programme, but with a burning chainsaw.
And the first target was the infamous Argentine rent law, a legal monster that had succeeded in the impossible feat of making houses disappear from a huge city like Buenos Aires.

The previous law was a masterpiece of bureaucratic sadism: endless contracts, adjustment indices decided by the state (while inflation was running at 200%) and an absolute ban on the use of currencies other than the peso, which is now worth less than used toilet paper.

What did the ‘madman’ Milei do? He said : ‘Freedom’. He abrogated everything. You want to make a three-day contract paying in chickens or cryptocurrencies? Go ahead. Do you want to adjust it every month or never? Your business.
Progressive commentators halfway around the world have prepared obituaries: ‘It will be chaos’, ‘People will die in the streets’.

The supply tango: when the market responds

Instead, twist of fate. The market, that monster that the Spanish socialists are trying to tame with chains, has reacted like an athlete whose weights have been taken off his ankles. In a few months, the supply of flats in Buenos Aires literally exploded.
Those who had bricked up their windows so as not to risk finding an eternal, morose tenant reopened their doors. The +170% of available flats is not a statistic, it is a roar.

And the black magic of capitalism struck again: with so much supply, real prices (i.e. those cleansed of the background noise of hyperinflation left by predecessors) started to fall.
Landlords stopped being dictators and went back to being traders, almost begging tenants to come in. In Buenos Aires today you can choose, you can negotiate, you can live. In Spain one can only hope for the benevolence of an algorithm or dumb luck.

Europe and the bureaucratic Stockholm syndrome

The contrast is so stark that it would deserve a Netflix documentary, perhaps entitled ‘How to Kill a City by Smiling’. On one side we have Spain, representing the European culture of regulations, caps, limits and ‘good intentions’ that pave the road to real estate hell.

On the other we have Milei’s Argentina, which reminds us of an elementary truth we have forgotten under layers of dusty ideology: scarcity is not fought with prohibitions, but with abundance.

Moral: less goodness, more chainsaws

Ultimately, the confrontation between Sánchez and Milei is the ultimate challenge between the socialism of the drawing rooms and the realism of the street.
The former puts roofs on houses, ensuring that no one can enter them; the latter tears down walls, ensuring that anyone can find one.

If we want to save Europe from the housing crisis, we have to stop looking at Madrid as a model and start looking at Buenos Aires as a promise.
Sure, Milei yells and shakes his chainsaw, while Sánchez has a tidy forelock and speaks in a persuasive voice. But between an impeccable hairdresser who leaves you homeless and a raving lunatic who doubles your rent offer, I already know who a tenant with an ounce of brains would give the keys to the house to.

Querido Pedro, a piece of advice: next time you go to South America, instead of lecturing Milei about democracy, take notes. You might find that the only thing a roof should cover is the heads of the citizens, not the ambitions of the owners and the hopes of the young.

Long live freedom, carajo, and especially long live the possibility of finding a two-room apartment without having to sell an organ on the black market.