Although many of the most important criteria used to monitor the fairness and freedom of the Spanish referendum process were met in an acceptable way, the lack of experience of the Spanish government in the organization of such electoral processes made this referendum far from perfect.

Apart from the short-term consequences of those mistakes (such as the low participation levels), we believe that some aspects of the process, and especially during the electoral campaign phase, did affect the fairness of the whole process.

However, this lack of fairness would have had more serious consequences if there had been more equal levels of support for each of the options. In that case, an unfair campaign would have raised doubts about the validity of the referendum process itself, which would have had more serious consequences both for the future position of Spain in the European Union and for the credibility of the political system..

The lack of internal debate in parties, unions and NGOs, and therefore the resulting lack of debate in civil society, resulted in missing an opportunity to increase the knowledge of Spanish citizens about the European Union.