From Precarious to Owners: The Evolving Housing Discourse of Vox in Spain (2015-2025)

In the last two years, housing has become the biggest source of socio-economic insecurity and concern for people living in Spain (El Pais 2025). Housing prices – both in the rental and buying market – have increased massively spreading housing precariousness. Notably, such a dynamic happens with a progressive coalition government in office, who has heralded the fight against employment and financial precariousness (Branco, Miró, and Natili 2024) but has failed to significantly address the issue of housing. Concurrently, Vox has being rising in the polls, repeatedly obtaining a relative majority of vote intentions among the young, segments of the working class and the lower-middle class. While it is not yet clear whether the housing question and the “proletarianization” of the Vox vote are two related phenomena, it is at least to be expected for Vox to address the housing issue, either to cater to the concerns of its constituencies or in a more conscient effort to mobilize it politically. This article investigates how Vox has framed the housing question between 2015 and 2025, which social groups it seeks to mobilize through this discourse, and which moral understandings of housing it promotes. Methodologically, the paper is based on a comprehensive qualitative content analysis of official party documents (electoral manifestoes, thematic booklets, policy pamphlets) and key speeches of party figures. Theoretically, the analysis draws on a three-dimensional interpretive framework (Damhuis et al., forthcoming) - originally developed to analyse political discourses around work – based on issue articulation, group appeals, and the moralisation of housing, I find that overall Vox articulates the housing question in relation to a banalized supply-demand framework, according to which liberalization of housing construction is to be favoured in order to expand supply, and a migration block is to be implemented in order to curtail demand. In recent years this discourse becomes more complex, linking the lack of access to housing property to persisting precarity, incapacity to plan a future, social uprooting and the impossibility to “form a family and having children”. This incorporates and twists some of the rhetorics of the Spanish populist left cycle. Vox here appeals explicitly to popular classes, the young, and particularly young (heterosexual) couples which are prevented from buying a house and thus start a family. Those groups are demarcated both downwardly against migrants, and upwardly against rich foreign digital workers and sometimes global investment funds. Vox openly defends a “conservative housing policy” aimed at the creation of a society of small owners based on housing property. Lack of housing property is seen as socially destabilising and conducive to an indecent life, different from the common-sense normalcy to which past generations where used to (“la España feliz de propietarios con trabajo, casa y coche”). This evokes a specific moral economy (Thompson 1971) – rooted in historical experiences of Spanish society, in which work effort should be recompensed with the reasonable possibility of acquiring property, which is regarded as the ultimate and only safeguard against socio-economic insecurity.