The morning police vans arrived in the historic working-class Madrid neighborhood of Vallecas, hundreds of neighbors, housing rights activists, and trade unionists had already formed human chains three ranks deep across the apartment staircase. Their singular goal was to halt the judicial eviction of Carmen Martínez Ayuso, an 87-year-old grandmother who had lived in the same humble second-floor flat for more than half a century. Carmen's plight became a flashpoint across Spain when it emerged that her home had been seized as collateral for a private loan taken out by her son years earlier—a debt she had no role in negotiating. Despite desperate attempts by local municipal mediators to negotiate an emergency leaseback or social housing transfer, tactical police officers breached the barricades, physically escorting the weeping pensioner onto the pavement while television cameras broadcast the scene live across the nation. A Coalition in Crisis and the Emergency Royal Decree The images ignited spontaneous protests across Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, and Seville, threatening to fracture Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez's parliamentary coalition. By midday, housing activists from the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) had encircled the Ministry of Housing, chanting "Ni casas sin gente, ni gente sin casas" (Neither empty houses without people, nor people without homes). Confronting an uncontrollable political backlash, the Council of Ministers convened an extraordinary legislative session, approving an emergency Royal Decree-Law that immediately freezes all court-ordered evictions involving individuals over the age of seventy, single parents, and households whose monthly income falls below three times the official public income indicator (IPREM). "A democratic society cannot look itself in the mirror when an 87-year-old citizen is displaced from her bed onto the street by financial institutions. Today's decree establishes an unequivocal red line: human dignity and