The regulation of interest group participation in the EU’s policy-making process has long been the source of contention among the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council. While the Council had long resisted any attempts to regulate its interactions with private actors, EU Member States recently signalled their support for an Interinstitutional Agreement on a Mandatory Transparency Register advocated by the European Commission. In her article “Regulating European Union lobbying: in whose interest?” published in the Journal of European Public Policy, Adriana Bunea argues that the key to this sudden shift in the Council’s position lies with the Commission’s strategy when formulating the agreement. Following a public consultation process on the agreement’s proposal, the Commission proved responsive to the input from stakeholders speaking on behalf of the public. Adriana finds that this strategy allowed the Commission to act as a legitimate policy initiator representative of public preferences, fostering its negotiation leverage vis-à-vis the Council. Her analysis suggests that on this issue “with high public salience and visibility, the Commission was ready to trade long-standing policy collaborators for a realignment with stakeholders that better served its contemporaneous needs for democratic legitimacy.”