Leftist leaders from around the globe met in Barcelona on Saturday to rally against the threat to democracy from the far right, with Spanish prime minister Pedro Sanchez and Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum displaying closer ties.
The gathering comes as democratic institutions and values are under pressure from advancing authoritarian and far-right forces, including in the West, where US president Donald Trump’s influence looms large.
Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was co-chairing the ‘Meeting in Defence of Democracy’ alongside Sanchez.
Attendees included South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, European Council chief Antonio Costa, Colombian president Gustavo Petro, Irish president Catherine Connolly, Britain’s justice secretary David Lammy and German vice-chancellor Lars Klingbeil.
Klingbeil said the meeting ‘is an important signal at a time when the world is becoming increasingly divided and when politics is also being conducted in a very swaggering manner.
He said it showed that the attendees ‘stand together in solidarity and that we are seeking cooperation’.
Sanchez and Sheinbaum warmly greeted each other in another sign of thawing relations. It was the Mexican leader’s first visit to Spain since taking office in October 2024.
Ties have been on the mend between their two countries after strains caused by Mexico in 2019 that Madrid apologise for historical abuses during the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonisation of the Americas.
Spain’s King Felipe VI last month acknowledged ‘a lot of abuse’ had happened in the colonial period in the Americas.
Sheinbaum, on arrival for the meeting, told journalists that there had never been a ‘diplomatic crisis’ between the two countries.
Sanchez, opening the meeting, underlined a need for reform of the United Nations, whose role has been sidelined in recent wars, most notably in the Middle East and in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
‘We think the time has come for the United Nations to be renewed, reformed and—why not of course—headed by a woman. It’s not only a question of justice, but a question of credibility,’ he said.
‘The context is clear: democracy cannot be taken for granted,’ he said.
Sanchez, one of the most vociferous critics of the Middle East war, already on Friday called for a reshaped multilateral order to challenge ‘those who... consider it dead or work to undermine its foundations’.
In an interview with Spanish daily newspaper El Pais ahead of the gathering, Lula stressed the Barcelona gathering was ‘not going to be an anti-Trump meeting’.
The event was being held the same day as a meeting of far-right European leaders in Milan in Italy.
It follows the defeat of Hungarian nationalist leader Viktor Orban in a general election on Sunday, seen as a setback for Europe’s far-right parties that had looked to him as a model.
Progressives have hailed the result as proof that entrenched populist governments can be defeated at the ballot box.
The Barcelona event was launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 after far-right parties made significant gains in European Parliament elections.
The first two editions of this event were held at the United Nations and the previous one was held in Chile last year.
Sanchez, in power since 2018, has emerged as a prominent figure for Europe’s disillusioned progressives, who see him as one of the few remaining openly leftist voices in a continent increasingly dominated by right-wing politics.
