Speech by President Lula at the Closing of the 1st Global Progressive Mobilization Meeting

I would like to begin my remarks by congratulating the President of the Government of Spain, Pedro Sánchez, on the outstanding organization of a progressive event that seeks to show the world that democracy has not died, that seeks to show the world that no one should feel ashamed of being progressive or being from a left-wing party. No one in the democratic world should be afraid to be who they are, to say what needs to be said, as long as the rules of the democratic game, as established by society itself, are respected.

And my praise, my dear Pedro, is for your courage in not allowing United States warplanes to depart from here to attack Iran. I am being careful here because I have a written speech and I feel tempted to speak off the cuff, but I must speak with great responsibility, because we are undertaking a very serious effort, one that cannot end with our remarks here and then only resume when we meet again in Mexico.

What we are doing here is the beginning of a movement that must act every single day, every week, every month, and all 365 days of the year, so that we may restore the most sacred values in the world, democracy and multilateralism.

The name of this initiative, Global Progressive Mobilization, says a great deal.

Each of these three words carries a program of action.

It is important to understand what they mean.

I stand before five thousand people who identify as progressives.

Politics has always been divided into two camps.

On one side are those who believe that individual interests take precedence over those of the collective.

On the other, there are those who believe that the well-being of each depends on ensuring a dignified and decent life for all.

This divide has had many labels.

Right and left, conservatives and progressives.

But extremism poses a new challenge.

The progressive camp has made significant advances in the area of rights.

The situation of workers, women, Black people, and many minorities is better today than it was in the past.

It is no coincidence that the backlash from reactionary forces has been so intense, expressed through misogyny, racism, and hate speech.

Yet progressivism has not succeeded in overcoming dominant economic thinking.

The neoliberal project promised prosperity but delivered hunger, inequality, and insecurity.

It has triggered one crisis after another.

Even so, we have succumbed to orthodoxy.

We have become managers of neoliberalism’s failures.

Left-wing governments win elections with a left-wing discourse and then implement austerity.

They abandon public policies in the name of governability.

We have become the system.

That is why it is no surprise that the other side now presents itself as anti-system.

The first commandment for progressives must be coherence.

We cannot be elected on one program and implement another.

We cannot betray the trust of the people.

Even if much of the population does not see itself as progressive, it wants what we are proposing.

People want to eat well and live well.

They want quality schools and quality hospitals.

They want a serious and responsible climate policy.

They want policies for the environment and for culture.

They want a clean and healthy world.

Decent work, with a balanced workday.

A wage that allows for a comfortable life.

The far right has been able to capitalize on the unease created by the unfulfilled promises of neoliberalism.

It has channeled people’s frustration by spreading lies upon lies: targeting women, Black people, LGBTQ+ communities, and immigrants. In other words, all the most vulnerable groups become victims of the hate speech promoted by these actors.

Our role is to point the finger at the true culprits.

A handful of billionaires concentrate most of the world’s wealth.

They want people to believe that anyone can make it there.

They feed the fallacy of meritocracy.

But they kick away the ladder so that others do not have the same opportunity to climb.

They pay fewer taxes, or none at all, exploit workers, destroy nature, and manipulate algorithms.

Inequality is not a fact. It is a political choice.

What makes us progressives is choosing equality.

Our guiding principle must always be to stand with the people.

This struggle must be global.

There is no point in keeping one’s own house in order in a world in disarray.

The lords of war drop bombs on women and children.

They spend billions of dollars on weapons that could be used to end hunger, solve the energy crisis, and address healthcare needs.

The Global South pays the price for wars it did not provoke and for climate change it did not cause.

It is treated as the backyard of major powers.

It is suffocated by abusive tariffs and unpayable debt.

It is once again seen as a mere supplier of raw materials.

To be progressive in the international arena is to defend a reformed multilateralism.

It is to defend the primacy of peace over force.

It is to combat hunger and protect the environment.

It is to restore the credibility of the United Nations, which has been eroded by the irresponsibility of its permanent members.

It is to create a system in which rules apply to all.

In which developed and developing countries stand on an equal footing in the Security Council, the World Bank, the IMF, and the WTO.

This is not an effort for governments alone.

The internet has become a battlefield.

Competing in the digital space is unavoidable.

But this struggle must go beyond the screens.

It must be taken to universities, to churches, to trade unions, to associations, to neighborhoods, and to society as a whole.

The far right shouts, lies, and attacks.

We must not be afraid to speak louder, and with great responsibility.

We must not be afraid to counter their arguments.

The threat that the far right poses to democracy is not rhetorical; it is real.

In Brazil, it plotted a coup d’état.

It orchestrated a plot that included plans for tanks in the streets and the assassination of the elected president, the vice president, and the president of the Electoral Court.

Pope Leo XIV stated that democracy risks becoming a mask for the domination of economic and technological elites.

Our role is to unmask these forces.

To unmask those who claim to stand with the people, but govern for the wealthiest.

Those who claim to be patriots, but put sovereignty up for sale and call for sanctions against their own country.

Those who proclaim to defend the family, but turn a blind eye to violence against women and the sexual abuse of children.

Those who claim to hold the truth, but spread lies and misinformation.

Those who consider themselves men of God, but have no love for their neighbor.

Those who speak of freedom, but persecute those who are different.

As sung by Joan Manuel Serrat:

‘You make the path by walking.’

Democracy is not a destination; it is a daily construction.

It must go beyond the vote and deliver concrete benefits to people’s lives.

There is no democracy when a father does not know where his next meal will come from.

There is no democracy when a grandchild loses his grandfather while waiting in a hospital line.

There is no democracy when a mother spends hours on a crowded bus and cannot give her children a goodnight kiss.

There is no democracy when someone is discriminated against because of the color of their skin. When a woman dies simply for being a woman.

We must replace despair and hatred with hope.

The Global Progressive Mobilization has an important mission: to recover the ability of progressive forces to project a better future.

A future with social justice, equality, and democracy.

These three terms, mobilization, global, and progressive, must go together.

Not as slogans, but as a living reality.

I would like to say something to you. I need to speak off the cuff for a moment. Please excuse me, my friend.

I have been feeling very restless. I am 80 years old. I started doing politics when I was 30. I spent 21 years of my life inside a factory. I came from a very poor region in my country, like millions of Brazilians, so as not to starve.

I ate bread for the first time when I was seven years old. And I learned politics quite late. And when I learned politics, I learned it because I discovered that within the National Congress, there were no representatives of working people, whom I believed were the very reason the political class existed.

Thanks to democracy in my country, which we rebuilt after 23 years of military rule — and I myself was stripped of my mandate twice as a union leader — Brazil, for the first time in its history, elected a factory worker as President of the Republic, without a university degree, with only a technical qualification as a lathe operator. I wanted to be elected to prove that intelligence is not linked to the number of years spent at university; it is linked to knowledge.

Intelligence is something more sacred, something we acquire through learning inside a factory or through engagement with Brazilian society. Everything I am in life I owe to a mother who was born and died illiterate. She died without ever learning to write even the letter O.

But what I know about character and proper conduct, I learned from that woman. And why am I saying this to you? Because I learned in political life, admiring American democracy. I often believed that the United States was the land of opportunity.

How many millions of Brazilians went to the United States? I was born into politics at the height of the Cold War, and we do not want any more Cold War with anyone. We do not want a Cold War between China and the United States. We want freedom, we want free trade, we do not want protectionism.

The progressive left was a victim of the Washington Consensus discourse. Many young people here do not remember it, but those who are 80 years old, like me, remember it, because they were already adults in the 1980s. And now I find myself analyzing what is happening in the world.

The world today is witnessing what is happening to the dear United Nations, which was created after the Second World War and set up a Security Council with five permanent members to safeguard peace, promote cordiality, and fraternity. They have effectively turned into five warlords. Because the Security Council does not allow things to move forward. When one approves something, another vetoes it.

And what kind of world are we living in? Today we have a number of armed conflicts that is the highest since the Second World War. Today we have war. The invasion of Iraq was a lie.

Where are Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons? They were never found. The invasion by France and England in Libya was another lie. What harm was Muammar Gaddafi causing at that historical moment of humanity? The invasion and the genocide carried out by Israel in Gaza is another great lie. And now the bombing of Lebanon by Israel, under what pretext? And further still, the United States’ invasion of Iran, under what pretext?

Governor of Minnesota, let me say something to you. In 2010, I went to Iran together with India and Turkey to negotiate with Mahmoud [Ahmadinejad, former Iranian president], an agreement so that Iran would not enrich uranium beyond the level that Brazil enriches for peaceful purposes, because in Brazil this is in our Constitution. Brazil is prohibited from producing and manufacturing nuclear weapons. This is in our Constitution.

And we went there to convince Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ali Khamenei. And after two days, we reached an agreement. An agreement that was based on a handwritten letter that Barack Obama sent me.

After two days, Ahmadinejad agreed to make the deal. When we published the agreement, I imagined we would be praised, because Iran would no longer enrich uranium, and the portion it would enrich would be sent to Turkey for safekeeping. What happened, my friend Pedro Sánchez? The European Union and the United States did not accept the agreement.

And now they are once again trying to build the narrative that Iran would develop a nuclear bomb. They were not going to build a nuclear bomb. We need to end this practice of telling lies about people in order to destroy them later.

Latin America is portrayed as if it were a world of drug trafficking. The Arab world is portrayed as if it were a world of terrorism. And who is good in this world? Who is good? We need to understand something very important.

Many times we have been victims of our own political innocence. How many times, Pedro, do we win elections and then the press, the financial system, and conservative academics write articles and news pieces, pushing us to try to dismantle what was the very reason for our election. And we begin to feel afraid, we start trying to please the market, we start trying to please business leaders, and what happens is that we end up becoming discredited.

So I think that, in this meeting here, I would like to say to President Donald Trump, to President Xi Jinping of China, to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, to President Emmanuel Macron of France, and to the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Keir Starmer, who are the five members of the United Nations Security Council: for God’s sake, fulfill your obligations to guarantee world peace. Convene a meeting and put an end to this madness of war, because the world can no longer endure it.

We do not want much. Poor people do not want much. They do not even want to take anything from the rich. Poor people want the right to a decent job, they want the right to decent work, they want the right to live in a good home, they want the right to study, they want the right for their children to become doctors, just like the children of their employers.

They want the right to a decent healthcare system. That is all we want, and all of this is in the Bible, all of this is in the constitution of every country, all of this is in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And why is it not being fulfilled?

I would like to end by saying something to you. I am 80 years old. I have tried, President Pedro Sánchez, my friend José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, I have been talking a lot with God. I have told God that I want to live to 120 years, because it is necessary to prove something.

I want to prove something. I want to prove that we do not grow old because the years pass. We cannot stop the Earth’s rotation. So the years will go by. Today I am 80, next year I will be 81. But that is not what makes people age.

What makes people age is losing motivation, losing a cause. If we all wake up in the morning with a cause, to defend a cause, we do not grow old. I tell you that I feel today the same as I did when I was 50 years old, because I have a cause.

My cause is democracy. My cause is freedom. My cause is equality.

My cause is to ensure that all people are respected. A small country, a small country like the island of my colleague Mia Mottley, must be respected just as much as a country the size of India. No one should be measured by technological power, economic power, or by the number of warships they possess.

I do not want war. I do not want war with Xi Jinping, I do not want war with Vladimir Putin, I do not want war with the United States, and I do not want war with you, Mia. I want peace, love, and fraternity, and I want to see the world move forward so that people can live better and with dignity.

That is what I want. My weapon is argument. My weapon is argument.
My weapon is reason. When President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on Brazil, saying there was a trade deficit with Brazil, I showed a document. Over 15 years, the United States had a 410 billion dollar surplus with Brazil.

And I said, no one will defeat me with lies. I do not have the wealth he has, I do not have the technology he has, and I certainly do not have the warships he has. I do not want war.

The only thing I want to say to him is that, even when we are poor, there is one thing we must have: character, honesty, and decency, so that we can respect everyone’s rights. That is why I would like to invite the President of the Government of Spain, my friend Pedro Sánchez, to speak.