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In a shock political move, Spain has rejected a public health bill that would have introduced a series of restrictions on gambling advertising, but authorities are expected to begin a renewed push to limit marketing this year.
Spain’s Congress of Deputies was rocked last week after Spain’s largest opposition party refused, at the last minute, to support the planned creation of a Public Health Agency.
Establishing the new body was seen as a formality and openly supported by the People's Party (PP) up until moments before the vote. But in a surprise move, the largest single party in Congress joined fellow opposition group Vox to vote against the measure and defeat the minority coalition government of Pedro Sánchez.
PP leadership said they had decided to vote against the public health bill as revenge for losing an earlier battle over farming and food waste.
The agency was billed as a response to the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a way to ensure Spain is better prepared to weather future crises.
But the bill to create it came attached with several gambling advertising limits, including restricting advertising to sporting events and banning the use of celebrities.
The restrictions echo those imposed by the government back in 2020, many of which were eventually overturned by the Supreme Court last year because they were enacted via royal decree and not through an act of Congress.
Last week’s defeat in Congress is seen by the gambling industry as a victory, but local experts have warned not to read too far ahead into the government’s failure to reintroduce tough marketing measures.
“It is more a political conflict than a regulatory blow,” said Xavi Muñoz Bellvehí, a partner with the ECIJA law firm in Barcelona.
Muñoz said there is little reason to believe the government will not take another run at reinstating gambling ad limits in the near future.
“Although we believe that whenever those articles are reinstated, maybe it will be with a softer text in terms of restrictions.”
There is even the possibility that the Public Health Agency bill itself could be resurrected.
“While this is a very positive outcome for the sector, we recommend caution: there is still a slight procedural uncertainty, as technically the bill could be sent back to the Committee stage and reactivated from there,” explained Camille Gonzálvez, a lawyer at ECIJA.
“That said, our reading is that the bill has been definitively dropped and would need to be reintroduced from scratch if the government wishes to pursue it again.”
Although the broad Public Health Agency project may be in question, the government is unlikely to be cowed by a difficult day in Congress in its quest to reinstate ad restrictions.
Not least because pressure to return Spain to a state of near-total prohibition for gambling advertising will come directly from the country’s gambling regulator.
Speaking at ICE in Barcelona in January, the head of the Directorate General for the Regulation of Gambling (DGOJ), Mikel Arana, called the Spanish market “very, very unbalanced” and lamented the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the restrictions introduced in 2020.
He vowed to ensure that marketing limits will be restored, in part to rein in an industry he believes is generating too much profit from too small a proportion of its customers.
Arana also said the DGOJ worked with the government last year to develop “relevant amendments”, likely referring to advertising regulations included in the now-defeated public health bill.
