The world has been lurching rightward. So three thousand people from over a hundred countries, myself included,  flew to Barcelona last weekend  to reverse it. The venue was the inaugural physical meeting of the Global Progressive Mobilisation, a platform formally launched last year and brought to life this weekend  for the first time, uniting progressive leaders, activists and movements from across five continents.  It was indeed a reckoning.

For too long, those of us who believe in equality, democracy and peace have been fighting the wrong battle. We have been defending, explaining, justifying, even apologising. We have allowed the far right to define the terms of debate, and then spent our energy contesting their framing rather than asserting our own.

Barcelona was a signal that this might be over.

Pedro Sánchez put it plainly: they shout not because they are winning, but because they know their time is running out. They have tried to make us ashamed of our beliefs.  That ends now, he told the rally. From now on, they can be the ones who feel ashamed. He said it with something I have not heard enough from progressive platforms lately: pride.

I agree. And I would go further.

In my intervention, I made a call that I want to reiterate here: progressives must go on the offensive. 

The evidence is all around us. Equality works. When states invest in childcare, wages rise and women enter the workforce. When anti-discrimination law is enforced, economies become more productive.   When pay gaps close, GDP grows. 

Equality is the condition for growth,  and I was glad to see one of the leading slogans in Barcelona: “Equality is the solution”.

And yet, we keep treating it as though it needs to be apologised for. As though it is a concession we made to identity politics rather than a structural insight about how societies actually work. This is our strategic error, and it is time to correct it because equality is the tool we need to repair a broken social contract.

Lula da Silva reminded us  that democracy created the welfare state, and that the crisis of democracy is partly a crisis of delivery. Where did democracy go wrong? he asked. His answer was that the working class is going backward and wealth is concentrating while the floor falls out from under the working family.

People were not wrong to feel abandoned. But the solution is not the strongman who doesn’t win because he is loved, but because the vacuum left by the state is filled by fear. The solution is equality, restored and deepened.

Citing Pope Leo XIV, Lula noted that democracy risks becoming a mask for the dominance of economic and technological elites. Our role, he said, is to unmask these forces. To expose those who claim to stand with the people but govern for the wealthiest. Who proclaim they defend the family but turn a blind eye to violence against women. Who speak of freedom but persecute those who are different.

This is the offensive posture. We must stop saying  “we are not as bad as them”, but: here is what we stand for, here is what it delivers, and here is who it actually serves.

There is one word, however, that I found too absent from the progressive conversation for too long: peace.

Saying ‘no’ to war is more than a slogan. It is a refusal to allow social investment to be incinerated in a new century of conflict.

Sánchez said it directly at the rally. In a moment when a US-Israeli war against Iran is reshaping the Middle East, when Spain has closed its airspace to American military planes, when Lula is calling on the UN Security Council to fulfil its obligations, saying no to war is the most structurally radical thing a progressive can say right now.

Because war and inequality are two sides of the same coin: one destroys the institutions, the other ensures they are never built.

Military spending crowds out social investment. Conflict destroys the organisations through which equality is built and sustained.

Peace is not merely a moral preference. It is a prerequisite for the progressive project.

Barcelona gave me conviction. The progressive movement is not in decline. It is in the process of rediscovering what it is actually for.

The far right is loud and its model of inequality, hierarchy, exclusion and conflict, is precisely what is breaking the world apart.

We have the alternative. We have the evidence.

What we needed, in Barcelona last week, was the nerve to say it without apology.

We found it. Now we must not lose it again.