Without caring for the forms
The immediate trigger for this latest twist leaves little doubt. The Government has approved the decree amid controversy over the business dealings of former president José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Thus, it continues the tradition of putting legal responses to the lobby on the table as a response to a scandal, but with the difference that this is the first time this response becomes Law.
To achieve this, the government has decided to use a procedure that is clearly inadequate. The Government abandons the parliamentary route, of a bill that had started in the previous legislature with the Draft Law and that, in its new version as Bill had been frozen for more than a year and a half, seeing how the deadlines for the presentation of amendments were extended time and again.
To do this, it resorts to the decree-law invoking compliance with Milestone 432 of the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan, a type of urgency, before Brussels, which is difficult to confuse with the "extraordinary and urgent necessity" required by article 86 of the Constitution for this type of norm.
Moreover, the RDL comes with a surprise: a third final provision that modifies Royal Decree 611/2026, of July 22, promoting the decarbonization of the transport sector, a matter with no evident relation to the alleged urgency, something that the Constitutional Court has questioned in the past. It is paradoxical that these problems with the form occur in a law that affects the drafting and decision-making of public policies, with the aim of improving them.
A good law
The law conforms to the latest international standards for the regulation of pressure groups and has managed to take advantage of both the various historical attempts at regulation, which in Spain date back to 1978, and the processing of the Bill, incorporating a good number of amendments from the different parliamentary groups, coinciding with the proposals that, for some time now, and in this same process, have been promoted by different civil society groups.
Among these novelties are the attribution of the management of the registry and the sanctioning power to the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, an already existing independent administrative authority, which is provided with a new General Subdirectorate to assume these functions, awaiting the creation of an integral figure; the expansion of the organizations subject to the law, incorporating unions and employers' associations; the establishment of a sanctioning regime that includes a system of economic fines, with very serious infractions —among them, offering gifts or attentions to public officials, operating without registration or falsifying the information provided— punishable by up to 40,000 euros; the specification of the regulatory footprint that the decree specifies in a report detailing which groups have intervened, with what documentation and with what effect on the final text; and the tightening of the revolving doors, extending to five years the obligations of active publicity for individuals with recent public experience.
Both the content and the basic consensus in it, which, as we have seen, incorporates the positions of the different groups and civil society, despite its probable ultimate motivation, opens the door to eliminate its original sin, its approval by RDL, during its validation, which should be accompanied by its processing as a Bill
There is still room for improvement
During that possible processing, the possibility of further reinforcing the regulatory footprint opens up, coordinating this with the mandatory publicity of the agendas of senior officials. It could also advance the relationship between existing registries (beyond interoperability), especially in the future and desirable registry of interest groups of the Cortes Generales.
Finally, and this is perhaps the point that receives the least attention in the public debate, is the absence of any mechanism for the democratization of lobbying. Lobby regulation is a unique opportunity to go beyond the control of influence activity, and it must be accompanied by a strengthening of the participation of groups and entities, especially facilitating that those with fewer resources —citizen organizations, neighborhood platforms, small NGOs— can exercise it under minimally comparable conditions to those who have professionalized public affairs departments.
Moreover, beyond the regulatory scope, its processing would be a golden opportunity to address through communication the differences between legitimate influence activity and influence peddling.
Mission accomplished?
The RDL 21/2026 is, with all its limitations, a milestone that we have been waiting for since 1978 when the constitutionalization of this matter was first proposed, and that both the sector, led by APRI, and academia and international organizations such as GRECO, the OECD, or the European Commission have been insisting on.
The validation in the coming weeks will be the first test of fire. The second, more important, will come later: the essential approval of the reform of the Regulations of the Congress of Deputies and the Senate that would establish this Register for parliamentary activity. Only then will some of us be able to proclaim, at last, mission accomplished.