Less than two weeks after a wave of housing protests broke out across Spain, on Monday center-left Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called an early general election. Upending the country’s political agenda in just days, the protests created an opportunity for an embattled Sánchez to go to the polls on more favorable terms. He is now framing the election as a choice between his defense of the social majority and right-wing parties aligned with speculators and vulture funds.

This was a remarkable turn of events, especially as Sánchez’s government had been in the firing line of housing protests just days before. The eviction of eighty-seven-year-old Maricarmen Abascal from her Madrid apartment on September 23 had ignited the largest protests Sánchez has faced from his left flank during over eight years in office. Tens of thousands marched through Madrid three days later, before the Sindicato de Inquilinas (the city’s tenants’ union) set up a sprawling protest camp in the iconic Puerta del Sol square, with similar encampments then springing up in other cities — echoing the Indignados occupations of fifteen years before.

Protesters demanded to know “Where is the progressive government?” and tenants’ union spokesperson Valeria Racu warned: “Either rentierism ends, or the government falls.” They were right to be angry: rental prices in Spain have increased 87 percent in the last decade, nearly three times as fast as wages.