“It all started in Barcelona!”, Pedro Sánchez has assured will be remembered in the future. While for years a far-right international has been rampant worldwide, accelerated after Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January 2025, this Saturday a progressive international, convened by the head of the Spanish Executive and the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has begun in the capital of Catalonia, as an alternative to the global reactionary wave and the new geopolitical and ideological order encouraged by the President of the United States.
“The far-right international and its subservient right-wing parties, lacking ideas that inspire and mobilize people, make a lot of noise. They shout so much and so loudly that sometimes it seems there are no others,” Sánchez warned this Saturday in Barcelona, at the closing of the Global Progressive Mobilisation. But he assured that no one should be fooled: “The ultras and the right-wing don’t shout because they are winning, they shout because they know their time is running out,” he predicted amidst the applause of the 6,500 international supporters gathered, according to the organization, at Fira de Barcelona.
Sánchez assured that the “neoliberal orthodoxy” of these right-wing parties, which “besides being inefficient is cruel,” “died in 2008” with the great financial crisis, overcome by progressive policies. “They know that their vision of the international order is being dismantled as a consequence of tariffs and illegal wars. They know that their surrender to climate denialism, xenophobia, and the machismo of the far-right international has been their biggest mistake,” he added. To conclude: “The right does not lead, the right languishes.” In his opinion, these right-wing parties have only brought four things to the world: “War, inflation, inequality, and social fracture.”
“The time of the far-right international and the right-wing surrendered to those reactionary postulates has come to an end,” insisted the socialist leader in an enthusiastic atmosphere at the socialist conclave, where the leader of the Italian Democratic Party, Elly Schlein, also spoke with a very powerful intervention in which she joined the unanimous cry of “No to war!”, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz – Kamala Harris’s running mate in the last elections won by Trump – or Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, and where also from the United States, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders showed their support for the progressive mobilization through videos.
With this international meeting held in Barcelona, Sánchez has already achieved two of his objectives: the unity of progressive forces from many parts of the planet and the recovery of pride among progressives, whose ideology and identity have been cornered by the rise of global right-wing parties. “They have tried to make us ashamed of our ideas and our history. But that ends today in Barcelona,” he assured, again to great applause. “Shame changes sides,” he warned, paraphrasing Gisèle Pelicot.
“From now on, shame on them,” the socialist leader stressed. “Shame on those who remain silent in the face of injustice, on those who exploit workers, who criminalize the different, who turn rights into commodities, who defend the privilege of elites, who support war and violence, in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Ukraine, in Lebanon, in the Middle East. Shame on them, for us, pride,” he stated. “The pride of being pacifists, environmentalists, trade unionists, feminists, and left-wing,” he enumerated. “Yes to peace and no to war!”, he exclaimed.
Sánchez defended “open societies,” and celebrated the launch of a new regularization process for half a million immigrants in Spain, despite the opposition of PP and Vox: “Spain is a child of immigration and will not be a mother of xenophobia,” he warned. He also lashed out at techno-oligarchs, assuring that progressive governments “will twist the arm of those who believe themselves untouchable, of billionaires who exploit people and whose greed knows no limits, of speculators who gamble with people’s savings and homes, of techno-oligarchs who want to line their pockets at the expense of the health of our democracies and the mental health of our young people.” “When progressives govern, states do not kneel before elites, we put them in their place,” he affirmed.
And he concluded his speech by calling for the recovery of “faith in progress” and confidence in the future, seeking to inject “a winning spirit” into this new progressive international.
