The president of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has defended the need for progressive leaders to join forces to stand up to the “reactionary international” that threatens democracy in the world since the traditional right has succumbed “to the frame and the discourse” of the ultra -right.
This has been spoken during the high -level meeting ‘Democracy always’ organized by the Chilean President, Gabriel Boric, in the Palace of La Moneda and in which the Brazilian President, Luiz Inazio Lula da Silva, have also participated; The Colombian, Gustavo Petro, and the Uruguayan, Yamandú Orsi, with the shared objective of offering a common front against the progress of the ultra -right and the threat to democratic institutions worldwide.
“It touches us, governments led by progressive forces, lead that response” to defend democracy, said the president of the Government, “and we have to do it alone, if necessary, together with civil society.”
According to Sánchez, “it is increasingly evident that there is a right, a traditional right with which until not so long we shared basic consensus, which has defected from that historical work and that has succumbed to the discourse and the framework imposed by the extreme right.”
And since “they are increasingly strong and are in more places” because there are no borders, “the progressive forces must act together, we must be more and more together and united,” hence the intention that Spain will take a new date of this type next year.
It is time to go a step forward
According to Sánchez, the five have “the shared conviction that it is time to take a step forward to actively defend and deepen democracy” and “go to the offensive” before the “real threat, led by a coalition of interests between oligarchs and the ultra -right.”
“An international hatred and the lie that advances dangerously, unfortunately, on both continents” and that does so, has stressed, “putting at risk the rights and freedoms for which the generations that preceded us fought so much, sometimes sacrificing their own life.”
Thus, the president has stressed that “preserving democracy is not only an institutional or legal issue” but “is a moral obligation” and also “a responsibility that we owe to past generations, but also to future generations.”
Work on three axes
The meeting that the five have held, and that takes over from a meeting in defense of democracy organized by Sánchez and Lula on the banks of the UN General Assembly last September, has allowed to identify three axes of action, as he explained.
First, they have agreed to “strengthen democratic institutions and multilateralism.” Second, he has indicated, we must combat misinformation. In this area, “Spain has proposed to promote democratic digital governance, collaborate to ensure that algorithms do not manipulate our opinions or weaken social cohesion and our coexistence.”
And finally, he added, reduce inequality. In the opinion of the chief of the Executive, this is “one of the main tasks, but the primordial of progressive governments” since it is injustice that “the one that ends up breaking the confidence of people in institutions.”
“Inequality is the cultivation broth where the virus of extremism and polarization grows,” he warned, stressing that “ultra -right lives politically of fear and feeds on nostalgia for a past that never existed.” Therefore, the president has finished, “it is crucial to advance policies that offer certainties and a horizon of hope before the future.”
Ask for self -criticism while celebrating the “successes”
In the subsequent meeting that the five leaders have held with representatives of civil society-in the case of Spain, the Vice President of the Alternative Foundation, Diego López Garrido, and a member of the Avanza Foundation and member of the PSOE Executive, Javier Izquierdo-, has said that, currently, when “the progressives” are in the government “things work better.”
“Many times the progressives think that it is easier to be in the opposition than in the government, more than to claim than to do. But the paradoxical is that we live at a time when the progressives, when we are in the government, we demonstrate that things work better, that we have another way to do politics, to govern our peoples, to end many of the neoliberal dogmas that after the financial crisis condemned many generations in our Societies, “he said.
Thus, he pointed out that “the task is not finished” and that, therefore, we must “be self -critical”, claiming that for this it is “determination, commitment and time” since “great changes need time, years and not months days or weeks”; Although, he has also defended “all those advances” and not take them for granted.
“Behind those conquests in freedoms and rights we are paying tribute to all the generations that preceded us to realize those rights in education, in equality, in freedom. Let us be of course vindictive, nothing complacent, but we celebrate the successes of progressive governments because they have cost generations to materialize them,” he said.
