The last couple of years had been hard for Europe’s leftist political movements.
Their most recent pet topics —such as support for (illegal) immigration, transgender rights, forced and swift green transition, and similar causes—have increasingly fallen out of favor with a significant portion of the electorate.
Elections in 2023 and 2024 showed a major setback for “progressive” parties such as socialists and greens, all around Europe. Their topics seemed to be out-of-sync with the realities of people’s lives: as voters started to feel financial difficulties (inflation, cost of living crisis) and growing insecurity (both due to the realities of the failed integration of immigrants and the war in Ukraine), their priorities started to shift, as well.
To maintain relevance and re-engage disillusioned voters, leftist movements realized that they must find new punching bags that resonate better with their voters.
It seems that Spanish socialists were the first to find a new topic and have begun to test it recently, while their European counterparts and think-tanks are watching from the sidelines to draw the consequences and to analyze the adaptability of the new quest.
This old/new issue is the “modern” enemy: mass tourism and short-term rental entrepreneurs as the reason behind the housing crisis. Hence, the answer to the problem is anti-tourism and anti-short term rental activism.
While politically attractive and might resonate well with the traditional leftist voters, these new directions are both misguided and dangerous, especially when it comes to attacks on the rights of private property and entrepreneurial ventures. Not only for the economic well-being of European cities like Barcelona, but also for the values of property ownership and free enterprise. Neither are they likely to solve the problem.
Barcelona became the lab rat for the new topic.
Ada Colau, Barcelona’s former mayor, is one of the key figures in this new political experiment.
No stranger to radical steps (in 2013, she was carried out by riot police officers when she occupied a bank in Barcelona with a group of radicals), she became a kind of folk hero in Spain. Then she transitioned from grassroots activism to politics, carrying along the anti-establishment anger.
During her tenure at the helm of Barcelona, Colau continued what she did as a housing activist, introducing measures that reflected her staunch opposition to tourism, particularly short-term rentals via platforms like Airbnb.
Although Colau’s administration attempted to implement policies to curb the rise of Airbnb and limit the number of tourist accommodations (e.g. by banning new hotels in the city center), the measures failed to work. In fact, Barcelona become one of the most visited cities.
Her anti-tourism agenda had a limited impact on the overall affordability of housing in Barcelona. If anything, housing costs kept on growing, along with the frustration.
Leaving office in 2023, she re-discovered her activist past.
During the summer of 2024, anti-tourism protests reached new heights. These protests were largely backed and organized by left-wing groups sympathizing with Colau’s platform. The claim was the same as before: Airbnb and mass tourism were responsible for driving up rents and making housing unaffordable for locals.
A simplistic answer to a complex problem, but one that can be easily amplified by global attention.
The numbers show a different picture.
Barcelona, with its around 700,000 residential properties, has only around 22,200 active properties listed on Airbnb, a small fraction of the housing market. On the other hand, the province of Barcelona has nearly 200,000 empty homes, and the city of Barcelona itself has more than 10,000 empty residential properties. The number of unoccupied buildings far outweighs the number of Airbnb rentals.
Instead of acknowledging the broader economic and bureaucratic problems behind the housing crisis, Colau’s administration and her political allies chose to focus on demonizing private property use and tourism as the culprits, a convenient scapegoat that fits into their larger (direct and indirect) anti-capitalist direction. Choosing a visible and easy-to-define enemy has been an effective political tool throughout history to mobilize masses, after all.
One of the defining features of this new wave of left-wing activism is its focus on attacking successful business models and mainly successful, private, self-entrepreneur individuals without offering real, practical solutions.
This was particularly evident in Barcelona’s case, where Colau’s almost ten-year tenure failed to address the root causes of the housing crisis: inflation, government bureaucracy, and a lack of development incentives. Instead, they have targeted platforms like Airbnb, an easy villain for the populist narrative.
Housing prices are soaring also in other regions of Europe where tourism has much less impact on it. Between 2017-2023 a 50 percent rise of house prices is the average in the EU. Spanish prices also match this trend having grown between 2015 and 2023 with 20-65 percent, depending on the location. In fact, Spain has only the 19th fastest growing housing prices in the EU, while other countries, even countries with less famous destinations, have experienced different realities. Hungarian house prices have gone up with an average of 178 percent, while the Czech Republic and Latvia saw a 145,77 percent growth.
The anti-home-owner-slash-anti-Airbnb movement aligns perfectly with the left-wing’s disdain for entrepreneurship and individual success. The rise of platforms such as Airbnb represents the essence of self-made opportunity—a model where individuals can turn their properties into revenue-generating assets.
But of course, it’s against the left-wing movements’ traditional approach of more state involvement rather than empowering individuals to find success through private means. This disdain for entrepreneurship fits into a larger ideological framework where private property and economic self-reliance are devalued.
And it is the perfect way to hide the other side of the coin.
Left-wing parties, particularly in Spain and Portugal, have shown no real interest in solving the housing crisis at its core. The lack of affordable housing in cities like Barcelona and Lisbon is not a direct result of Airbnb or tourism but rather a reflection of years of bureaucratic inefficiencies and overregulation in the housing and construction sectors.
For example, obtaining building permits in Spain can be an excruciatingly long and complicated process, deterring developers from pursuing new projects, so is it in Portugal. The overregulated rental market (that, in the guise of tenant protection makes it literally impossible and a legal nightmare to get rid of unpaying tenants or ones that demolish the building), generates an ocean of empty homes in both countries.
This bureaucratic red tape is particularly prominent in regions governed by socialist governments. In Spain, it can take years to get approval for new housing developments, which exacerbates the supply shortage. At the same time, high taxation and restrictive regulations make it difficult for landlords to rent out their properties, further shrinking the available housing stock. Instead of addressing these fundamental problems, left-wing movements have taken the easy route—blaming tourists and entrepreneurs for problems created by their own policies.
Portugal’s now ousted Socialists would have had many years to address the issue, but rather chose to ignore slow-burning issues until those all came to the “unavoidable boil”. As the 2023 elections approached, the Costa Government tried to address the problem, focusing on housing affordability and blaming tourism for exacerbating the crisis (the infamous “Mais Habitacao” act). However, this narrative failed to galvanize enough support to counterbalance the party’s broader economic failures and administrative inefficiencies.
The surge in anti-tourism and housing crisis activism by left-wing parties across Spain is not a new phenomenon. Only, that was once a spontaneous grassroots movement, now became a deliberate attempt to shift political focus after significant electoral losses. In cities like Barcelona, Palma de Mallorca, Málaga, and the Canary Islands, where these protests have been most visible, there’s a direct correlation between the rise of these movements and the declining support for parties like Podemos.
After the 2023 elections, it became evident that voters had grown frustrated with the left’s stance on controversial issues like illegal immigration and transgender rights at a time when they seemed to have abandoned traditional Socialist causes. Unable to regain voter confidence on these fronts, left-wing parties latched onto the housing crisis as a new populist weapon, specifically blaming tourism, as an external enemy.
In the city of Barcelona, where tourism is the main drivers of economic activity with 150,000 direct and indirect jobs (that is about 8.6 percent of the city’s employment and the fourth-greatest wealth creation activity), and generates an economic return of €9.6 billion, this approach feels like “biting the hand that feeds you”.