What Business Do Democrats Have in Barcelona?

We have fewer than 200 days to go before Democrats “definitely” win back the House and derail Trump 2.0. And yet some of them took a plane to Barcelona this past weekend to go widely off-message. Trumpeting an anti-MAGA global rollback, the participants in the “Global Progressive Mobilization” event joined Spain’s limelight-hogging Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. These token gringos, mind you, weren’t some fist-raising Democratic Socialist organizers; they were Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani, Tim Walz, and Chris Murphy (although several of them appeared remotely).

This cross section of Democratic officials proved that they had unlearned the lesson they had been taught in 2024 about the danger of catering to excitable mobs of keffiyeh-clad activists.

The event featured a who’s who of far-left chieftains — Colombian President Gustavo Petro, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa — all marred by either corruption or illiberal tactics of their own.

Sánchez has basked in the media attention he earned since he denied the U.S. military the use of Spanish bases and airspace for strikes against Iran. He knows that he will be burdened by the sleaze within his entourage in Spain’s parliamentary elections next year, so he hopes that the bugbear of Trump-unleashed “anarchy,” as Sanders put it in his speech, will prove a mightier electoral influence. Posing as the EU’s last leftist premier, his best shot is to label his opposition — the right-of-center People’s Party as well as the national-populist Vox — indistinctly as the Trumpista “far right.”

America’s “Barcelona Democrats” seemed not to realize that they stand to lose from playing along to this tune. In fact, they have every reason to treat Sánchez as a nuisance. Murphy, for example, labeled Trump’s White House as history’s “most corrupt” just as Sánchez’s wife could face up to 24 years in jail for influence peddling. This is not to say that hitching his wagon to the train of anti-Trumpism won’t work for Sánchez; it just means that Democrats should beware of the convoy’s passengers. Sánchez is now outspokenly anti-NATO and anti-American. Spain’s underspending on defense and repeated obstructionism — to say nothing of the country’s anti-Israel antics and overtures to China — will saddle the alliance well beyond the end of Trump’s second term.

Murphy and Walz attended the Barcelona event in person. Mamdani delivered a taped rallying cry for urban affordability and equality against ravenous Big Capital. This scapegoating of the rich for urban dysfunction seemed a tailored rhetorical assist to Barcelona. The city reels from everything Mamdani was elected to fix in New York — rising rents, a housing shortage, homelessness — only as a consequence of the left’s policies: from zoning laws, rent control, and lax policing to permissiveness toward squatting. In a city bled by capital flight after the attempt at Catalan secession in 2017, separatists have turned to enlisting migrants to their cause against Spain, resulting in rampant crime and the growing encroachment of Islamists in Barcelona.

Barcelona Democrats are embracing not the EU or liberalism but their leftmost irritant. Not content with playing to right-wing conspiracies of a transatlantic deep state, Walz indulged in a dose of sepia-toned nostalgia when invoking Minnesota’s Lincoln Brigade (volunteers in the Spanish Civil War) and calling on Europe to return the favor against American fascism. Quite the swing-district attack-ad fodder.

Elections worldwide these days might be partly about Trump, but Democrats stand to lose from believing that foreign lefties are their natural allies or naturally deserving of their help (what Mamdani called “practicing solidarity” in his message). Recall that, less than a week before the Barcelona event, in an election closely watched by Republicans, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost despite JD Vance’s last-minute show of support in Budapest. Running as global progressives was a losing strategy for Democrats two years ago. If their game plan remains the same, good luck in November.