Europe’s ungovernable. Breaking news, I know.

On Monday, an already fraught political environment took a further turn for the chaotic when Spanish premier Pedro Sánchez called a snap vote after the country’s legislature snubbed his attempt to pacify a populace aggrieved at the spiraling cost of housing.

Public disaffection with the affordability crisis crescendoed late last month when María del Carmen Abascal, a disabled, high-mileage octogenarian, was evicted and hauled away from her Madrid apartment — wait for it — on a stretcher.

I’m going to pause to let you laugh. And don’t pretend you aren’t laughing. Yes, it’s sad. Obviously. That’s the whole point: It’s laughably sad, and it was the straw that broke the camel’s back for tens of thousands of locals, who took to the streets.

The building where Abascal lived since the 1950s was purchased by a property management company, which raised her rent more than fivefold to €2,650/month, a burden twice her monthly disability stipend. The investment firm at the center of the controversy subsequently agreed to lower the rent to the original €500, allowing Abascal to return to the apartment as soon as she’s medically able (she was hospitalized following the eviction). But the damage was done.

Sánchez, who hasn’t passed a budget yet in his latest term, tried to patch things up with an ad hoc housing proposal that would’ve, among other things, prevented disabled 87-year-olds who can’t make rent from being thrown onto stretchers and out onto the sidewalk, but fractious parliamentary dynamics doomed the measure.

Spain’s actually doing pretty well economically. The issue here is the optics of multiple governability crises engulfing three of Europe’s largest economies: France, Germany and Spain. The snap vote call in Spain came just days after France’s similarly intractable domestic politics — and specifically the spectacle of a paralyzed legislature debating a doomed budget — breached the levee for OATs.

I mentioned this last Thursday, but it got considerably worse the following session. As the figure above shows, we’re fast approaching territory where the ECB will have to ponder an intervention.

That latter point conjures uncomfortable memories of European crises past. Much of Monday’s mainstream financial media coverage was couched in language that accidentally suggested the bloc’s debt emergencies belong to some distant era. That’s not the case, and I’m not just saying that to make myself feel better about being 43. These recurring budget/debt scares are a fixture, and they allude to the inherent difficulty of sustaining a currency union without a shared fiscal framework.

The euro hit a 17-month low on Monday, as you might’ve heard, plastered as the headline was across Bloomberg’s front page.

The timing leaves something to be desired. There’s never a “good” time for a debt crisis, but the ECB’s in the process of raising rates to prevent another war-driven surge in energy prices from working its way into price- and wage-setting across the bloc. The last thing the GC needs is to be saddled with the imperative of buying bonds to cap spreads over bunds during a rate-hiking campaign.

The situation in France is especially vexing. It’s likely that Marine Le Pen will finally usurp the Élysée in 2027 (on her fourth try), which is to say France is about to have a far-right president whose father was… well, I’ll just let that hang there.

It’s not an exaggeration to describe a runoff between Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon — one possibility for the second round of voting on May 2 — as a worst-case scenario for markets.

All of that at a time when Germany, the bloc’s political, financial and economic anchor, is experiencing its own political paroxysm, with AfD having scored consecutive wins in state elections and determined to bulldoze the Brandmauer.