PROGRESSIVE ALLIANCE AT THE GLOBAL PROGRESSIVE MOBILISATION
Barcelona, 17–18 April 2026
Something changed in Barcelona. You could feel it in the sessions — not in the way conference atmospheres often flatten into performance, but in the care with which people chose their words. The leaders and delegates who gathered on 17 and 18 April 2026 were not there to celebrate. They were there because the moment required it. Rising authoritarianism. A multilateral order under deliberate pressure. Wars that have displaced millions. A climate crisis that does not wait for consensus. These were not agenda items. They were the air in the room. Progressives gathered in Barcelona fully aware of what is at stake and even more committed to do what our movement has long been called upon to do best: meet the moment together.
The Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), under Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, chose to host this gathering at a moment when Spain’s progressive government has come to symbolise, for many, the continuing possibility of democratic and social progress — which is to say that Spain itself was a political statement for the largest gathering of our movement in decades. Hana Jalloul, PSOE’s Secretary for International Policy, made the coordination work across all organisations and dozens of political cultures. The PA is genuinely grateful.
The Party of European Socialists (PES), under Stefan Löfven and Giacomo Filibeck, brought the institutional weight and discipline this scale of forum requires. The Socialist International (SI) leadership brought the long tradition of what international solidarity looks like as practised across generations. Global Progress Action (GPA), under Johan Hassel, Director of GPA at the Center for American Progress (CAP), brought a strategic and transatlantic dimension to the mobilisation — a partnership that widened its reach and its ambition.
The PA is grateful, too, to PES Women for a partnership built together to make feminist leadership visible and supported. And to Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (FES), whose co-organisation of the PA’s substantive panels made it possible to bring party leaders across continents to the same table for the same conversation. These partnerships produce real political work and we do not take them for granted.
The PA publishes this report because our members are owed an honest account of this recent global engagement. Before Barcelona, we stated publicly what we intended to do and why. This report returns to that record — where we delivered, where we fell short, and what we carry forward. Progress, as Pedro Sánchez and Stefan Löfven wrote to participants after the forum, is neither automatic nor guaranteed. That observation is as much for us as for anyone else.
