BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva started a two-day visit to Spain on Friday when he and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez 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.
Sánchez 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.
“We 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,” Sánchez told reporters.
Sánchez’s 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 “deep solidarity” with Pope Leo XIV following public criticisms made by Trump after the pontiff slammed the Iran war.
Lula and Sánchez 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 — all bugaboos of Trump, Lula's neighbor in Argentina, Javier Milei, and Europe's far right.
The meetings come amid a busy week for Sánchez, who just returned from meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years.
Lula and Sánchez, 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.
Their bilateral meeting was a prelude for Saturday's double dose of gatherings when Lula and Sánchez confer with other leaders inside a sprawling conference center in Spain’s second city.
“Brazil and Spain are side by side in the trenches together,” Lula said. “We are an example that it is possible to find solutions to problems without giving into the empty promises of extremism.”
In that vein, Lula said that the aim for Saturday was to discuss how “democracy must go beyond just voting and bring real benefits to people’s lives.”
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 “extremism, polarization and misinformation” 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.
This edition will include the presence of European Council President António 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.
“If the president of Mexico and South Africa are coming, that means our group is growing,¨ Lula said about how he sees the tide could be turning to favor progressive and middle-of-the-road political parties.
Sheinbaum’s participation comes after Spain’s King Felipe VI ironed out a longstanding diplomatic dispute regarding Spain’s colonial past when he recently acknowledged the Spanish conquest of the Americas had led to the “abuse” of native peoples.
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 Sánchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, who is now president of the Party of European Socialists political grouping, discussed the idea at a meeting of European Socialists last year.
Sánchez 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.
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.
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 “middle powers” seeking out new strategies to deal with a world of aggressive superpowers.
Lula, Sánchez and other leaders at the events “share the understanding that the world is not just for the great powers,” Morillas told The Associated Press.
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AP writers Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil, contributed.
