You can't have (our usual kind of) democracy without the appearance of an explicit mandate. People really don't like it if you try to take that away from them, no matter how irrelevant it is in practice.

So given that Lisbon has been crafted to avoid the need for a formal popular mandate, it was never going to be acceptable.

The silliness about chipping babies and drafting them into the EU Child Zombie Flesh-Eating Radioactive Army would have been background noise if Lisbon had had a solid populist foundation.