The Spanish Congress voted down the decreto-ley extending the rental price-freeze on Tuesday 28 April 2026. PP (Partido Popular, the centre-right opposition), Vox (right-nationalist) and Junts (Catalan independentists) coalesced against; PSOE and Sumar took the loss; PNV abstained1. The vote came six days after the cabinet approved its national housing plan, and one month after Madrid's High Court refused to suspend the €64m fine on Airbnb.
The prórroga would have run the freeze for two further years. Inquilinos (tenants) who filed an extension request during the month the decree was in force have no statutory cover after the vote, and whether their filings still bind their landlords now depends on the Tribunal Constitucional or Tribunal Supremo. "Leaves thousands of tenants in the air" was the El País framing of the result2.
Pepa Millán, Vox's spokesperson in Congress, told the chamber that "with a collapsed system, Spaniards have to come first", deploying a prioridad nacional (national priority) frame on housing politics for the first time on a national platform3. Sumar's Verónica Barbero rebuked the trio and claimed housing as the real prioridad nacional from the progressive side. Madrid's PP mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida used the moment to say Madrid would "triple the 150,000-home target" already in the city's planning pipeline. He named no permits, no schedule, no funding line.
Once spoken from the Congress floor on 28 April, Vox's prioridad nacional cadence becomes available to PP candidates in the 2026-2027 municipal cycle without further authorisation. That mainstreaming is the durable consequence of Tuesday's vote rather than the headline defeat. The same coalition that won the supply-side vote on Wednesday lost the tenant-protection vote on Tuesday, with the parliamentary arithmetic running both ways within the same week.
