MADRID—Spanish politicians no longer have to worry about street protests hitting too close to home.

The government announced a ban on gatherings within three blocks of any politician’s home Wednesday, days after more than 100 people waved banners and blew whistles outside the deputy prime minister’s front gate.

The restriction was a sign of the government’s concern that demonstrations generated by years of recession in Spain are becoming more aggressive and less manageable.

Over the past month, a movement called the Platform for Mortgage Victims has organized small in-your-face rallies outside the homes of elected officials and other members of the governing Popular Party.

The group is protesting the party’s rejection of key parts of its petition to Parliament, which bears 1.4 million signatures, to ease the plight of needy homeowners who have defaulted on their mortgages.

“The politicians have been invited to attend our meetings and listen to our arguments, and they have declined,” said Edurne Irigoyen, a spokeswoman for the group, which says it represents thousands of debtors. “Since they don’t know reality, we’re going to their homes to inform them.”

The movement calls these actions escraches, named for a tactic used by protesters in Argentina in the 1990s to confront members of the former military regime over the deaths of thousands of prisoners who disappeared during that country’s Dirty War.

The Spanish escraches have reinvigorated a protest movement that mainly targets government spending cuts, tax increases and other austerity measures. Large street protests mobilized by a movement of indignados, or indignant ones, peaked in 2011, and have continued on a smaller scale, with little impact on policymakers.

The Platform for Mortgage Victims, closely allied with the indignados, has mobilized escraches against Popular Party officials in dozens of cities, including nine in Madrid.

Esteban González-Pons, a member of Parliament, said he was in Madrid on March 20 when his wife called to tell him that dozens of activists were chanting slogans against him outside their apartment in Valencia.

They covered the building’s entrance with stickers and posters depicting Mr. Gonzáez-Pons’s face with red blots dripping from his mouth. Some walked upstairs to the apartment door and chanted “Killer! Killer!”–a reference to the suicides last year of at least two homeowners who faced eviction after defaulting on their mortgages.

“They are trying to make me change my vote,” the legislator said. “I can accept that they want to put pressure on me, but going after my family is pure coercion.”

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