UPDATE 1-Evicted Spanish octogenarian Maricarmen Abascal, heart of Spain's housing protests, has died

​Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old ‌woman whose ​eviction sparked housing protests in Spain, has died, Madrid's tenants' union said on ‌Wednesday.

Abascal's eviction sparked a series of protests across Spain in the past couple of weeks, including activists camping on one of ‌Madrid's main squares, and calls for tackling a mounting housing ‌crisis. Those protests, along with parliament's rejection last week of decrees aimed at curbing evictions and limiting rent pressures, prompted Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez to ⁠call ​an early election ⁠for November 29.

Sanchez is seeking to shift the political narrative from his government's ⁠handling of a migrant crisis in Spain's North African enclave of ​Ceuta and a series of corruption cases involving his Socialist ⁠Party and his family to the housing crisis, an area in which ⁠he ​can harness growing resentment about rising rents. Angel Victor Torres, Spain's territorial policy minister, lamented the news, saying Maricarmen had ⁠become a symbol of what was happening to many families, elderly ⁠and young ⁠people struggling to obtain their own homes or stay in them.