elections were held for the first time in the new Member States , eight of which had fresh memories of the non-democratic past . This , combined with a lack of understanding of the relevance of the only directly elected European institution , led to a lack of political interest among the public at large .
In countries like Poland , where participation rates were 58.85 % in the accession referendum and 45.68 % in the 2019 European elections , it is clearly not justified to take the turnout of 20.87 % in 2004 as a political demonstration of anti-European sentiment . In the European referendum in June 2003 , turnout had been 58.85 %, and 77.45 % had voted for accession . So when elections came , for most people in Poland , EU accession was already an accomplished deed , confirmed on 1 May 2004 , and even before that when we had celebrated the end of negotiations in Copenhagen on 13 December 2002 . Even if the elections could be seen as putting the finishing touches to the enlargement process , the epochal moment of returning to Europe had already been achieved and the people of Poland felt they had already mobilised themselves in extraordinary numbers for that purpose . The last moment of exhilaration was 1 May 2004 . People on the voting lists for the 2004 elections were not associated with the European process but rather with Polish politics . Still , having looked at those elections with hindsight , it can be said that they were one of the defining moments for European integration . But people ’ s engagement in European elections did not recover until 2019 when , for the first time , two truly European challenges – the rule of law and the climate crisis – dominated the campaign and stimulated the turnout ( which reached 50.66 % for the EU as a whole ).
Moreover , if we look at the European institutions through David Easton ’ s ‘ black box ’ model , as a structure of relations in each society through which binding or authoritative allocations are formed
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