{"id":6264,"date":"2026-04-17T12:32:32","date_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:32:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/6264\/"},"modified":"2026-04-17T12:32:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-17T12:32:32","slug":"brazils-lula-and-sanchez-of-spain-headline-meetings-of-progressive-leaders-in-barcelona-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/6264\/","title":{"rendered":"Brazil’s Lula and S\u00e1nchez of Spain headline meetings of progressive leaders in Barcelona"},"content":{"rendered":"

BARCELONA \u2013 Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva<\/a> is starting a two-day visit to Spain on Friday where he and his Spanish counterpart Pedro S\u00e1nchez<\/a> will meet with other leaders, mostly of mid-to-small-sized countries, who are concerned with the fate of the democratic order and the rise of the populist far right.<\/p>\n

Lula and S\u00e1nchez are both outspoken in their criticism of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened both with punitive tariffs<\/a>. They are considered standard-bearers of progressive or liberal politics on their respective continents, where reactionary parties and far-right populism have been on the rise for years. <\/p>\n

Lula and S\u00e1nchez, along with ministers from their cabinets, are meeting at a former royal palace in Barcelona on Friday when they are expected to sign agreements regarding their economies, technology and social policies.<\/p>\n

Their bilateral meeting will be prelude for the following day\u2019s double dose of gatherings when Lula and S\u00e1nchez confer with other leaders at two events inside a sprawling conference center in Spain\u2019s second city.<\/p>\n

\u2018Not anti-Trump\u2019<\/p>\n

The first gathering on Saturday is the IV Meeting in Defense of Democracy. The event was launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 as a forum to exchange ideas aimed at combating the \u201cextremism, polarization and misinformation\u201d that undermines participatory democracy, the organizers say. The first two editions of this event were held at the United Nations and the previous one was in Santiago, Chile, last year.<\/p>\n

While both Lula and S\u00e1nchez have spoken out against many of Trump’s positions and policies, including his decision to attack Iran<\/a> along with Israel, Lula said that the multilateral summit should not been seen in that vein.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is not going to going to be an anti-Trump meeting,\u201d Lula told Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds on Thursday. \u201cWe are going to discuss the state of democracy, to see what went wrong and what we have to do to repair it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This edition will include the presence of European Council president Antonio Costa, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Colombia president Gustavo Petro, and other leaders of countries from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.<\/p>\n

Sheinbaum\u2019s participation comes after Spain\u2019s King Felipe VI ironed out a longstanding diplomatic dispute<\/a> regarding Spain\u2019s colonial past when he recently acknowledged the Spanish conquest of the Americas had led to the \u201cabuse\u201d of native peoples.<\/p>\n

At a time that Latin America has felt a rightward political swing and mounting pressure by the Trump administration, Sheinbaum has become one of the most powerful leftist voices in the hemisphere. She enjoys soaring approval in Mexico and has been able to strike a careful balance between maintaining a strong relationship with Trump, while pushing back on key issues like Latin American sovereignty.<\/p>\n

Rallying the Left<\/p>\n

Many of the leaders from the first event will stay put for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, held at the same venue later on Saturday. The gathering of left-leaning politicians and policymakers was launched after S\u00e1nchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan L\u00f6fven, who is now President of the Party of European Socialists, discussed the idea at a meeting of European Socialists last year.<\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez and Lula will both give speeches at the event, which is expected to have 3,000 attendees, including U.S. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and feature round tables dedicated to issues ranging from wage inequality to how to improve election results for progressives.<\/p>\n

The meeting comes amid a busy week for S\u00e1nchez, who just returned from meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping<\/a>, his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years.<\/p>\n

S\u00e1nchez’s government declared its airspace closed to U.S. planes<\/a> being used in the Iran war, and said it is not allowing the U.S. to use jointly operated military bases<\/a> in southern Spain for actions related to the war.<\/p>\n

Earlier this week, Lula released a video message expressing \u201cdeep solidarity\u201d with Pope Leo XIV following public criticisms made by Trump after the pontiff slammed the Iran war.<\/a><\/p>\n

Middle powers mingle<\/p>\n

Pol Morillas, director of the Barcelona-based foreign affairs think tank CIDOB, said that the gatherings are meant to be a show of force by traditional democratic leaders who have seen how the populist far-right has successfully forwarded its messages of anti-migration and economic nationalism through international gatherings.<\/p>\n

Morillas also sees the meetings in the context of the speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney<\/a> that shook the Davos economic forum in January on the importance of so-called \u201cmiddle powers\u201d seeking out new strategies to deal with a world of aggressive superpowers.<\/p>\n

Lula, S\u00e1nchez and other leaders at the events \u201cshare the understanding that the world is not just for the great powers,\u201d Morillas told The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

____<\/p>\n

AP writers Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed.<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"BARCELONA \u2013 Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva is starting a two-day visit to Spain on Friday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6265,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4103,4102,1970,4057,194,363,2312,4061,2606,205,70,17,4101,394,2607],"class_list":["post-6264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-antonio-costa","tag-chris-murphy","tag-claudia-sheinbaum","tag-cyril-ramaphosa","tag-donald-trump","tag-gustavo-petro","tag-king-felipe-vi","tag-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva","tag-mark-carney","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-pope-leo-xiv","tag-spain","tag-stefan-lofven","tag-world-news","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6264\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}