Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva is starting a two-day visit to Spain on Friday where he and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sanchez will meet with other leaders, mostly of mid-to-small-sized countries, who are concerned with the fate of the democratic order and the rise of the populist far right.
Lula and Sanchez are both outspoken in their criticism of US President Donald Trump, who has threatened both with punitive tariffs. They are considered standard-bearers of progressive or liberal politics on their respective continents, where reactionary parties and far-right populism have been on the rise for years.
Lula and Sánchez, along with ministers from their cabinets, will meet at a former royal palace in Barcelona on Friday when they are expected to sign agreements regarding their economies, technology and social policies. Their bilateral meeting will be a prelude to the following day’s double dose of gatherings when Lula and Sanchez confer with other leaders at two events inside a sprawling conference centre in Spain's second city.
The first gathering on Saturday is the IV Meeting in Defence of Democracy. The event was launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 as a forum to exchange ideas aimed at combating the “extremism, polarisation and misinformation” that undermines participatory democracy, organisers say.
The first two editions of this event were held at the United Nations and the previous one was in Santiago, Chile last year. While both Lula and Sanchez have spoken out against many of Trump’s positions and policies, including his decision to attack Iran along with Israel, Lula said that the multilateral summit should not been seen in that vein.
“This is not going to going to be an anti-Trump meeting,” Lula told Spanish newspaper El País on Thursday. “We are going to discuss the state of democracy, to see what went wrong and what we have to do to repair it.”
This edition will include the presence of European Council president Antonio Costa, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Colombia president Gustavo Petro, and other leaders of countries from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.
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.
At a time that Latin America has felt a rightward political swing and mounting pressure by the Trump administration, Sheinbaum has become one of the most powerful leftist voices in the hemisphere.
She enjoys soaring approval in Mexico and has been able to strike a careful balance between maintaining a strong relationship with Trump, while pushing back on key issues like Latin American sovereignty.
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