Spain has concluded this week a new legislature without yet addressing the recommendations of the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) regarding the regulation of the links between political leaders, especially parliamentarians, and the so-called interest groups. This is a requirement that this body of the Council of Europe has been raising since 2014 and which is also supported by the European Commission.
GRECO, to which Spain joined in 1999, has insisted since 2014 on the need to establish controls and provide transparency to the actions of interest groups and their influence on the drafting of laws.
In practice, Spain has been under scrutiny for 12 years due to the absence of specific regulations in this area and seeing how GRECO demands that it ensure greater transparency both about the activities of those trying to influence and those receiving that influence.
In its most recent report, from 2024, the European Commission also pointed out that Spain had not registered additional progress in this area and urged it to advance a law that contemplated the creation of a mandatory public register of "lobbies".
Limited progress in Parliament
For its part, GRECO has been warning that it is not enough to establish a register of influence groups, but it is essential to make public the agendas of parliamentarians to know who meets with whom, for what purpose, and what issues are addressed.
In the realm of the Cortes, there have been some formal progress, but GRECO continues to consider them insufficient. In 2019, Congress greenlit its Code of Conduct, which already required its members to publish their agendas on the Chamber's website and include in any case the meetings held with representatives of any entity with the condition of an interest group.
In 2020, with the approval of the Code of Conduct of the General Courts, this requirement was extended to senators, but the Office of Conflict of Interests of the General Courts has been drawing attention each year to deputies and senators for continuing to fail to comply with it.
The Cortes even went so far as to develop a guide to explain to parliamentarians how to upload their agendas to the website, but in its latest report, corresponding to 2025, the Office of Conflict of Interests found that this point of the Code of Conduct continued to be disregarded.
80% of parliamentarians do not detail their meetings
At the beginning of this year, all members of the Chambers were already publishing their strictly parliamentary activities, but 78% of the deputies and 79% of the senators still did not report other activities or meetings, and those who did communicated them only sporadically and almost never mentioned meetings with associations, organizations, or representatives of interest groups.
The Code of Conduct includes the dissemination of agendas, but does not regulate lobbying activity within Parliament. Therefore, in May 2025, the PSOE registered a proposal to reform the Congress Regulations to address this issue, which included, among other points, the creation of a Register of interest groups.
The initiative began its processing, the groups registered their amendments in November of last year, but the committee responsible for debating them was never convened. With the dissolution of the Cortes, the reform lapsed after being kept in a drawer for a year.
In addition, at the beginning of 2025, the Government green-lighted the draft Law on transparency and integrity of the activities of interest groups. The Plenary accepted its processing in February of that year, but the amendments were not presented until September and, ultimately, the committee did not meet due to the lack of consensus among the groups.
To try to unblock the situation, on August 25, the Council of Ministers resorted to the formula of the royal decree-law, arguing that the regulation of "lobbies" was part of the commitments of the Recovery Plan and was linked to the disbursement of funds to Spain. However, Congress, with the votes of PP, Vox, and Junts, repealed the decree law on September 16.
More than 250 lobbies were registered
During the period in which the decree law was in force, more than 250 entities managed to register in the State Register of Interest Groups to continue developing their influence work before the General State Administration.
The management of this register, which in the draft law that was paralyzed in Congress had been attributed to the Office of Conflicts of Interest, dependent on the Ministry for Digital Transformation and Public Function, was ultimately left in the hands of the Council of Transparency and Good Governance, an independent authority.