Foro Madrid and the North-South diffusion of the radical right script

In March 2020, the President of VOX - a Spanish populist radical right party - presented to Donald Trump, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States, and Latin American right-wing leaders a project to create an international anti-communist organization: the Foro Madrid. The Foro Madrid is aimed at blocking the advancement of the left in what is being portraited as the Iberosphere, an imagined community made up of Spain and Latin American countries. Although the Foro Madrid and its manifesto - the Carta de Madrid - are framed in terms of the defence of liberal values and institutions allegedly threatened by left-wing forces, it is in fact composed of illiberal actors that advance domestic political agendas not only opposed to Bolivarianism but also at odds with liberal-democratic norms. The paper describes the emergence and functioning of this transnational North-South cooperation network, which is thought of as a diffusion process of an illiberal script with right-wing authoritarian tendencies. The paper seeks to provide a preliminary characterization of the Foro Madrid. It also helps to bridge the scholarship on the populist radical right in comparative politics with the scholarship on the transnational diffusion of authoritarianism in IR.