Even before María del Carmen Abascal died on Wednesday night, a mere fortnight after her eviction from the Madrid flat where she had lived for most of her life, the frail 87-year-old woman had become the enduring face of Spain’s housing crisis.

Her plight – and the wider issue it embodied – had led to street demonstrations, the creation of a protest camp in the middle of the Spanish capital, and spurred the socialist-led government to propose emergency measures to facilitate and protect access to housing. When rightwing and far-right parties voted down those measures in congress last week, the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, responded by announcing a snap general election for the end of November.

Abascal’s death now looks set to focus even more attention on housing in the run-up to that election and, in particular, on what her lawyer has called “the shameful violence of these types of evictions and the evident impact and consequences they can have on people’s health”.

With more than 42% of Spaniards identifying access to housing as their main worry and with rents having risen by 80% over the past decade, the most pertinent question may be: why has it taken the eviction of an octogenarian and the accompanying protests to shake Spain’s political class into action? To which the answer could be that, despite years of protests against overtourism and gentrification, the tipping point had not been reached. Now, arguably, it has.

On Thursday, Spain’s state centre for sociological research published polling that showed that 76.3% of those surveyed were in favour of the state intervening in the market “as much as necessary to guarantee everyone’s access to housing”, while 79% believed housing should be prioritised as a constitutional right.

Sánchez’s socialist-led government is keen to persuade voters that it is the only political force that cares about rents and tenants’ rights – hence the emergency measures, which have been redrafted into two new decrees after their defeat in parliament last week. The 21 measures include facilitating renting or buying a new home; extending eviction protections for vulnerable residents; prohibiting speculative real estate purchases, and granting tax breaks to property owners and tenants who pay on time.

“These are measures that, if I may say so, are a matter of simple common sense; a matter of humanity,” the prime minister said on Tuesday. “They unite small property owners and tenants while standing up to vulture funds, precisely because they target only those who view housing merely as a commodity for speculation.”

The measures come almost three years after the prime minister promised to build 184,000 affordable public rental homes. His government has also sought to address soaring housing prices by introducing a law allowing authorities to cap “disproportionate” rent prices in some areas.

Those who had voted down last week’s decrees, Sánchez said, had done so despite studies showing the measures enjoyed “cross-cutting support that transcends ideology”, adding that the public was in favour of regulating “a dysfunctional market”. He is now hoping that at least one of the decrees will be passed by congress’s permanent council, a special body that operates when parliament is not in session. Its approval could go some way to convincing voters that his administration is taking the housing issue seriously.

Others disagree. Alberto Núñez Feijóo, the leader of the conservative People’s party, which voted down the measures last week, has said it is a bit late for Sánchez, who has been prime minister since 2018, to suddenly appoint himself Spain’s housing champion.

“Housing has been the big failure of this government but will be the success story of the one that follows it,” he said on Monday. Feijóo, whose party is leading the polls, added: “When a prime minister has been in power for eight years, it’s hard to blame others for what he’s failed to do.” The PP has promised to address the crisis by building 200,000 homes a year, lowering taxes and cutting down on bureaucracy.

However, the PP’s decision to side with the far-right Vox party and the rightwing Catalan pro-independence Junts party to fell the measures has left it looking less than committed to the issue of the day. Sánchez and his allies will be hoping that fact will not be lost on voters as the election campaign kicks off and as trade unions prepare a general strike over housing for 11 November.

Mindful, perhaps, of the distance between his words and his party’s voting history in congress, Feijóo called for people not to manipulate Abascal’s death to suit their own purposes.

“No campaigning, no political parties, no partisan ends, no more bricks in the wall,” he said on Wednesday night. “When a person dies there should be nothing but respect.”

And yet, despite the primacy of housing as an issue, Feijóo opted to start his campaign in Spain’s North African territory of Ceuta, where at least 141 people died as tens of thousands tried to cross over from neighbouring Morocco at the end of July. The Spanish government’s handling of the mass crossing, which saw about 80,000 people enter Ceuta, has been criticised at home and abroad. Speaking in the territory on Wednesday, Feijóo promised that its safety would be at the “top of [the] in-tray” if he became prime minister.

Vox, meanwhile, has responded to Absacal’s death by posting footage of a TV interview in which she said she held Sánchez responsible for what had happened to her. The far-right party accused the socialists of using “the suffering of an elderly person to stage a campaign to hide the government’s responsibility in the housing disaster”. It also suggested that Sánchez had visited “ruin and death” on Spain in the form of the floods that killed 230 people in Valencia two years ago, last year’s nationwide power cut, the deadly train crash in southern Spain in January, and recent events in Ceuta.