BARCELONA, Spain — A high-profile gathering of progressive and centrist democratic leaders convened in Barcelona on Saturday, with a shared mission to reverse eroding public trust in the global liberal order, which faces growing pressure from surging far-right extremism and spreading international conflict. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, a vocal critic of U.S. President Donald Trump and the recent U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran, is hosting two interconnected events focused on democratic resilience and progressive policy in the convention center of Spain’s second-largest city.
The fourth iteration of the Meeting in Defense of Democracy brought together sitting heads of state from across the Global West and Global South, including Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Colombia’s Gustavo Petro. In addition to leaders from 10 other nations represented at the summit, British Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy also took part in the proceedings.
Though no attending leader explicitly named Trump during the portion of the summit open to media coverage, the shadow of his administration’s staunchly unilateral agenda — a sharp break from decades of established U.S. foreign policy, marked by repeated public criticism of NATO and the United Nations — hung over every discussion. The entire summit is framed around defending the existing multilateral, rules-based global system that Trump’s approach has directly challenged.
Opening the gathering, Sánchez laid out the core threats that attendees have united to address: “We all see the attacks against the multilateral system, the repeated attempts to undermine international law and the dangerous normalization of the use of force.” He outlined the summit’s key priorities for strengthening the global order: kickstarting comprehensive reform of the United Nations, implementing regulatory frameworks for social media platforms to curb the spread of hate speech and harmful disinformation, and developing evidence-based policy solutions to address rapidly widening economic inequality around the world.
“ We all share the vision that democracy is the best system to respond to the complexities of our societies,” Sánchez added. Organizers note that the forum was first established in 2024 as a joint initiative by Brazil, Spain, and Chile, created to serve as a collaborative space for developing strategies to counter the triple threats of extremism, deep political polarization, and widespread misinformation that have eroded the foundations of participatory democracy across the globe.
Following the conclusion of the defense of democracy summit, a subset of leaders remained in Barcelona to participate in the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, an event expected to draw roughly 3,000 left-leaning elected officials, policy experts, and activists to exchange ideas and coordinate cross-border action.
Saturday’s back-to-back gatherings came one day after Sánchez and Lula held a pre-summit bilateral meeting at a historic former royal palace in Barcelona. The two leaders used that discussion to highlight their shared alarm over the series of ongoing conflicts that have roiled global stability: Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Israel’s military offensive in Gaza launched in response to the October 2023 attack by Hamas, and the latest outbreak of hostilities involving Iran that has sent shockwaves through global energy markets.
Sánchez and Lula occupy a unique space in contemporary global politics: they count among the small handful of high-profile progressive leaders who have retained national power and popular support despite a broad global shift toward right-wing governance. Both leaders have consistently upheld multilateral cooperation, universal human rights, robust environmental protections, and gender equality — a set of core values that have come under repeated attack from Trump, Argentina’s libertarian far-right President Javier Milei, and a growing bloc of far-right movements across Europe.