24/09/2026
In late August, Spain took a real step toward lobbying transparency. On Tuesday 25 August, the Council of Ministers, not the Parliament, approved Royal Decree-Law 21/2026, regulating the transparency and integrity of lobbying activity. It was published in the official state gazette (BOE) the next day and entered into force on 27 August. But on 16 September, Congress refused to ratify it, and the decree was repealed.
What the decree actually did
A mandatory register. Every interest group had to sign up, listing the people working on its behalf, a detailed account of its influence activities, (for professional lobbyists) any collaborators who had held public office in the previous five years, its internal compliance systems, and a running log of its contacts, meetings, and hearings with officials. The register was public, free and electronic, and run by the Council for Transparency and Good Governance rather than the Conflict of Interest Office, as the earlier bill had proposed. Without prior registration, meetings and contacts with officials that involved influence activity were prohibited.
- Public, updated disclosure. The register’s data was published in open formats and, according to law-firm summaries of the decree, updated every fifteen working days. Meetings had to be minuted, and information was public by default.
- Real penalties. Sanctions included fines of up to €40,000. The most serious violations carried a ban on registering for two to five years. Serious infractions carried fines of €2,000 to €5,000 and a suspension of three months to a year. The Council for Transparency and Good Governance was to investigate and decide cases.
- A revolving-door cooling-off period. Senior officials were barred for two years after leaving office from carrying out professional influence activities related to the areas they had overseen in government (through an amendment to Law 3/2015 on senior officials).
- A “regulatory footprint” report. Each rule-making process in which interest groups took part had to produce a standardised report documenting the inputs received, their impact on the final text, and the inputs that were not taken on board.
- A broad definition. “Interest group” covered any person or organisation carrying out influence activity, professional or not, for profit or not. The exclusions were narrow: public administrations, international organisations, political parties, and professional associations acting in a public capacity.
- Why now
Like most EU member states, Spain has been considering regulating lobbying for over a decade (the debate dates back to at least 2013). So why now, and why by decree?
Here’s the political backstory. The government registered a bill in January 2025, but it stalled in the Finance and Public Service Committee of Congress for lack of support. In July, the European Commission warned Spain about its limited progress on regulating interest groups. The decree’s preamble justified its urgency by a milestone in Spain’s EU recovery plan (CID 432), which conditions the release of EU funds. Press reports put the amount at around €1.5 billion.
The Cerdán affair, which broke in June 2025, is part of the backdrop, but the reporting we found ties the decree’s urgency to EU funding conditions rather than to the scandal itself. Santos Cerdán, PSOE’s own organisation secretary, was accused, based on leaked audio and a Civil Guard report, of managing kickbacks tied to public-works contracts, alongside a former transport minister and his aide. Cerdán denied wrongdoing but resigned from the party, gave up his seat in Congress, and spent five months in pre-trial detention before being released in November 2025.
How did the lobbyists react?
Reaction from the lobbying profession itself was initially positive, as it generally is when these laws recognise and legitimise the services provided in this space. APRI, the association representing institutional relations professionals, welcomed the decree. Its president, Carlos Parry, called the regulation of interest groups “a matter of democratic quality.”
After the vote, the trade press said the outcome sent lobbying regulation back to square one, as happened in 2023 when an early election ended an earlier attempt. By then, more than 250 organisations, including thirteen public-affairs consultancies, had signed up to the register. Transparency groups such as Fundación Civio also lamented the decree’s fall, recalling that GRECO, the OECD and the European Commission have repeatedly recommended regulating lobbying.
Testing it against the OECD’s own rulebook
The OECD has had international guidance on this since 2010: the 10 Principles for Transparency and Integrity in Lobbying. Lined up against them, Spain’s decree did well in some places and left real gaps in others. This is based on summaries of the published text by legal commentators. The exercise remains a useful benchmark for any new attempt.
- Transparency (Principles 5–6): strong. A public, mandatory, regularly updated register is exactly what the OECD asks for. The decree also required a “regulatory footprint” report documenting the inputs received while a rule was drafted and what became of them. That is precisely the kind of disclosure the OECD singles out as best practice.
- Revolving doors (Principle 7): solid. The OECD specifically recommends cooling-off periods for officials leaving public service. Spain’s two-year bar on senior officials joining interest groups tied to their old brief matched that closely.
- Enforcement (Principle 9): the weak link. The OECD is explicit that rules alone aren’t enough. Countries need properly resourced monitoring and enforcement, not just penalties on paper. A €40,000 fine looks tough, but the gap between announced sanctions and sanctions actually issued is where lobbying laws have historically failed, in Spain and elsewhere. The decree did give enforcement to the Council for Transparency and Good Governance, an independent authority, which is a plus. But whether it would have had the staff and budget was never clear. Legal commentators also noted that the decree set no transitional regime for launching the register and its electronic forms. See “Will anyone check the paperwork?” below.
- Fair, equal access (Principle 1): untested. The OECD’s first principle isn’t really about disclosure at all. It’s about making sure ordinary citizens and under-resourced groups get a fair shot at being heard, not just well-funded lobbyists. The decree named equality of opportunity among its stated aims, but the summaries we found point to no concrete mechanism for it. Transparency rules don’t fix it on their own.
- Periodic review (Principle 10): unclear. We could not confirm from the available summaries whether the decree included a built-in review clause. The question is now moot, but any successor text should include one.
Why it fell, and what to watch
Congress said no. On 16 September, Congress voted 179 against, 155 in favour, with 12 abstentions, and the decree was repealed. PP, Vox, Junts and UPN voted against; PSOE, Sumar, ERC and Bildu voted in favour; PNV and Podemos abstained. Critics attacked the government for using a decree-law on a text that had been stuck in Congress for a year, instead of seeking consensus in Parliament. Above all, they objected to the treatment of trade unions and employer organisations as interest groups. The government argued that the decree had taken on board 90% of the proposals from parliamentary groups, including PP and Junts. In principle, the effects produced while the decree was in force are preserved.
Will anyone check the paperwork? Groups had to keep their register entries up to date. Filing a report, someone actually reading it, catching lies in it, and fining people who lie are three different things. It was never clear that the transparency council had the staff or budget to do more than collect the filings.
It only covered the national level. These rules applied to the General State Administration and its public institutional sector, not, as far as the summaries indicate, to Parliament. If you’re lobbying a regional government (Catalonia, Andalucía, Madrid’s own regional government) or a city hall, none of this applied. Several regions already have their own lobbying rules, and the CNMC has run a voluntary register since 2016. A lot of real influence in Spain happens outside the national ministries.
It did not survive the 30-day clock. This wasn’t passed as an ordinary law. It was pushed through by decree because the government didn’t have the votes in Congress. Under the Spanish constitution, decree-laws must be ratified by Congress within 30 days, or they are repealed. Given how fractured Congress is, that was a genuine risk, and it materialised.
Bottom line
The Spanish lobbying decree would have marked real progress, and on paper it matched or arguably exceeded OECD benchmarks on disclosure and revolving doors. But the two things we said would decide whether it made a difference, capacity to enforce the law by monitoring compliance and political survival past the 30-day clock, were never tested, because the decree failed the second. Spain is back at square one. The ordinary bill registered in January 2025 had stalled in Congress, and the EU recovery-plan milestone that drove the decree’s urgency remains to be met.