Brussels - If European Union referenda were football games, the bloc's top managers would long since have been fired. Since 2000, the bloc's record on popular votes has been a grim played 9, won 3, lost 6. Not even England's football team performed that badly while failing to qualify for the Euro 2008 championship.
"Everyone knows it's very difficult to win referenda on the EU: they are complicated, and they can seem so threatening," Hugo Brady, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform in London, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Since September 28, 2000, referenda have turned into the EU's greatest headache. On that date, Danish voters rejected the EU single currency, the euro, despite all-party political support for a yes.
Nine months later, Irish voters also turned against their major political parties to reject the EU's Nice treaty.
A repeat vote 16 months later returned a yes, as did referenda on the EU's constitution in Spain and Luxembourg in 2005.
But a Swedish vote on joining the euro in 2003, French and Dutch referenda on the EU's constitution in 2005, and Ireland's vote on the Lisbon treaty on Friday have all handed stinging rejections to some of the union's most cherished projects.
Analysts say that there are four main reasons why the EU has such a bad track record when it comes to seeking its citizens' backing.
In the first place, the EU is based on a complex set of treaties which are, in turn, based on complex compromises between 27 states.
That complexity leaves a vast amount of room for misconceptions.
"Everyone hates the EU for their own, sometimes conflicting reasons. The Danes think it's out to sideline NATO, the Irish are afraid it will make them join, the Poles think it's pro-abortion and the Swedes think it's anti," Brady said.
Secondly, the EU regularly finds its member states taking the credit for popular EU laws, and blaming unpopular ones on Brussels.
"There is always a tendency for governments to say that if things are bad, it's the fault of the EU, and if things are good, it's thanks to the government," Piotr Kaczynski, an expert on EU reform at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, said.
Those problems have been compounded by what experts see as a failure by EU leaders to explain key issues to their people.
"Nobody has taken the responsibility for communicating Europe when it comes to the real issues and problems: in Ireland there was a yes campaign and a no campaign, but there was no information on what's in the treaty," Kaczynski said.
But beyond all those factors is the problem that referenda can turn into votes on something
