BARCELONA – On Friday, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva embarks on a two-day visit to Spain. During his stay, he will join Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and other leaders from predominantly mid-to-small-sized nations. Their discussions will focus on concerns about the future of democratic governance and the increasing influence of far-right populism.

Lula and Sánchez are vocal critics of former U.S. President Donald Trump, who has previously threatened them with punitive tariffs. Both leaders are seen as champions of progressive or liberal ideologies in their respective regions, where reactionary parties and far-right populism have been gaining traction over recent years.

The two leaders, accompanied by members of their cabinets, are set to convene at a historic royal palace in Barcelona on Friday. Here, they are anticipated to sign agreements that will touch on areas such as economic cooperation, technological advancement, and social policies.

This bilateral meeting will set the stage for a series of discussions scheduled for the following day. On Saturday, Lula and Sánchez will engage with other leaders at two significant events held at a major conference center in Barcelona.

‘Not anti-Trump’

The first of Saturday’s gatherings is the IV Meeting in Defense of Democracy. Initiated by Brazil and Spain in 2024, this forum serves as a platform for exchanging ideas to combat “extremism, polarization, and misinformation” that threaten participatory democracy, according to the organizers. The inaugural two meetings took place at the United Nations, with last year’s edition hosted in Santiago, Chile.

While both Lula and Sánchez 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.

Rallying the Left

Many of the leaders from the first event will stay put for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, held at the same venue later on Saturday. The gathering of left-leaning politicians and policymakers was launched after Sánchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, who is now President of the Party of European Socialists, 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 Senator Chris Murphy, and feature round tables dedicated to issues ranging from wage inequality to how to improve election results for progressives.

The meeting comes 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.

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.

Middle powers mingle

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.