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Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joan Monfort\/AP<\/p>\n
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da greet each other during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joan Monfort\/AP<\/p>\n
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joan Monfort\/AP<\/p>\n
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joan Monfort\/AP<\/p>\n
Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, gestures next to Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva during a Spain-Brazil summit in Barcelona, Spain, Friday, April 17, 2026.<\/p>\n
Joan Monfort\/AP<\/p>\n
BARCELONA, Spain (AP) \u2014 Brazilian President Luiz In\u00e1cio Lula da Silva started a two-day visit to Spain on Friday when he and his Spanish counterpart Pedro S\u00e1nchez met a day before they will gather with other leaders, mostly of small to mid-sized countries, who are concerned with the fate of the democratic order and the rise of the populist far right.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez and Lula have been outspoken in their criticism of the decision by the U.S. and Israel to attack Iran that has caused energy prices to soar. Both spoke in favor of peace, while not naming U.S. President Donald Trump, who has threatened both with punitive tariffs in the past, during a one-hour news conference after their summit.<\/p>\n
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\u201cWe want to double our efforts to work for peace and for a reinforced multilateral order. While others open wounds, we want to mend them and cure them,\u201d S\u00e1nchez told reporters.<\/p>\n
S\u00e1nchez\u2019s government declared its airspace closed to U.S. planes being used in the Iran war, and said it is not allowing the U.S. to use jointly operated military bases in southern Spain for actions related to the war. 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.<\/p>\n
Lula and S\u00e1nchez are among the few progressive leaders who have withstood a shift to the right and remain popular in their countries while defending multilateral agreements, human rights, environmental protections and gender equality \u2014 all bugaboos of Trump, Lula’s neighbor in Argentina, Javier Milei, and Europe’s far right.<\/p>\n
The meetings come amid a busy week for S\u00e1nchez, who just returned from meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years.<\/p>\n
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Lula and S\u00e1nchez, along with ministers from their cabinets, signed 15 agreements ranging from trade and satellite connections to the exploitation of rare earths needed for industry when they met inside a former royal palace in Barcelona.<\/p>\n
Their bilateral meeting was a prelude for Saturday’s double dose of gatherings when Lula and S\u00e1nchez confer with other leaders inside a sprawling conference center in Spain\u2019s second city.<\/p>\n
\u201cBrazil and Spain are side by side in the trenches together,\u201d Lula said. \u201cWe are an example that it is possible to find solutions to problems without giving into the empty promises of extremism.\u201d<\/p>\n
In that vein, Lula said that the aim for Saturday was to discuss how \u201cdemocracy must go beyond just voting and bring real benefits to people\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n
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A growing group<\/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
This edition will include the presence of European Council President Ant\u00f3nio Costa, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, and the leaders of other countries from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf the president of Mexico and South Africa are coming, that means our group is growing,\u00a8 Lula said about how he sees the tide could be turning to favor progressive and middle-of-the-road political parties.<\/p>\n
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Sheinbaum\u2019s participation comes after Spain\u2019s King Felipe VI ironed out a longstanding diplomatic dispute 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
Rallying the Left<\/p>\n
Many of the leaders from the first event will stay put for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, a gathering of left-leaning politicians and policymakers, being held at the same venue later on Saturday. The format was launched after S\u00e1nchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan L\u00f6fven, who is now president of the Party of European Socialists political grouping, 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 Sen. Chris Murphy, and feature round tables dedicated to issues ranging from wage inequality to how to improve election results for progressives.<\/p>\n
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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 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
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AP writers Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, right, and Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva review troops during a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6382,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4103,92,1970,4057,194,363,31,4273,2312,4061,2606,1561,2317,205,70,2314,2316,17,4272,4101,2607],"class_list":["post-6381","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-spain","tag-antonio-costa","tag-barcelona","tag-claudia-sheinbaum","tag-cyril-ramaphosa","tag-donald-trump","tag-gustavo-petro","tag-iran","tag-javier-milei","tag-king-felipe-vi","tag-luiz-inacio-lula-da-silva","tag-mark-carney","tag-package-100024-ap-online","tag-package-100373-mc-complete-state-national","tag-pedro-sanchez","tag-pope-leo-xiv","tag-product-30598-ap-national-news-report-a-wire","tag-product-32502-ap-online-europe-news","tag-spain","tag-spain-brazil-sanchez-lula-meeting","tag-stefan-lofven","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6381","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=6381"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6381\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6382"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6381"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6381"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/spain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6381"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}