Sanchez and Lula rally global left in Barcelona against far right surge

Pedro Sanchez and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva opened a high-stakes political showcase in Barcelona on Friday, bringing together left-leaning leaders, activists and organizers in a bid to show that progressive politics can still offer a coherent answer to nationalist and far-right movements.

The main event, the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilisation, is set for April 17-18 at Fira Barcelona Gran Via. Official materials describe it as a two-day meeting of political leaders, activists, thinkers and progressive parties and movements from around the world, with panels, workshops and plenary sessions built around democracy, social justice, multilateralism and the green transition. A separate Spanish government-backed gathering, In Defence of Democracy, is being held alongside it, giving the Barcelona meetings both a partisan edge and a more institutional setting.

About 3,000 people are expected, including heads of state, mayors, union representatives and campaigners. Among the named attendees are South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Uruguayan President Yamandú Orsi, European Council President António Costa, former Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven and Socialists and Democrats leader Iratxe García Pérez. Ramaphosa arrived in Spain on April 16 for a working visit through April 18, with an audience scheduled with King Felipe VI in Madrid and a bilateral meeting with Sanchez in Barcelona.

The timing is deliberate. Sanchez and Lula have both been vocal critics of Donald Trump, and European and Latin American progressives see his cuts to humanitarian aid, military interventions and threats to abandon NATO as part of a broader shock to the international order. The Barcelona meetings are meant to move beyond diagnosis and toward a usable agenda, one that links democracy, human rights, international law and multilateral cooperation to practical politics rather than campaign slogans.

The diplomatic symbolism is especially sharp in Sheinbaum’s case. She announced on April 10 that she would travel to Spain, her first diplomatic trip to Europe and the first visit by a sitting Mexican president to Spain since Enrique Peña Nieto in 2018. Her presence carries added weight after nearly eight years of tension between Mexico and Spain, tied in coverage to Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s 2019 demand that Spain acknowledge abuses from the conquest.

The broader project reaches back to an earlier In Defence of Democracy meeting co-led by Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Uruguay during UN High-Level Week in New York on September 24, 2025. In Barcelona, the question is whether that alliance can become more than a summit circuit, and whether the global left can leave with a strategy that has the discipline to compete with the far right’s message in elections, not just in declarations.