DUBLIN, Ireland — Political leaders across Europe were shaking their heads in frustration this weekend at the Irish voters’ veto of the latest European Union treaty. But many of their citizens weren’t.

Ordinary Spaniards, Dutch, French and Britons, who wish they could get the same chance, might also say “no” to the cold, distant heart of Europe.

“Spaniards feel Spanish, the French feel French and the Dutch feel Dutch. We will never all be in the same boat,” said Eduardo Herranz, a 41-year-old salesman in Madrid, Spain.

Herranz said Europeans were right to feel alienated from bureaucrats in the EU base of Brussels, Belgium.

“You don’t decide on anything, and you don’t get to vote on anything they are talking about,” he said of the average voter. “In day-to-day life, out on the street, the European Union is something very distant.”

The emotional disconnect between EU commissioners and their 495 million citizens has never been more evident than in the rejection of the Treaty of Lisbon on Thursday by voters in Ireland, long considered one of the most pro-European voices in the 27- nation bloc.

The complex, 260-page document sought to change EU powers and institutions to keep them in line with its rapid growth into Eastern Europe, but like all EU documents requires unanimity to be ratified.

While all other EU members are ratifying it only through their national governments, Ireland is constitutionally obliged to subject all EU treaties to a popular vote. The unexpectedly strong “no” result announced Friday effectively acts as a veto.

The EU’s political establishment is already calling on all other members to keep ratifying the treaty through their governments alone, while calculating what it will take to make Ireland vote “yes.”

Ireland’s government played along with such a maneuver in 2002, when it staged a second referendum after narrowly rejecting a previous EU treaty, then haggling for an appendix that emphasized Ireland’s military neutrality.

Many Europeans say this is exactly the problem with democracy Brussels-style, where European Commission members are not directly elected but wield continental powers.

“We’re told we can vote no, that the system requires unanimity. But when (a ‘no’ vote) actually happens, every time, the EU tells us: You really only have a right to vote yes,” said Dublin travel agent Paul Brady, who voted against the treaty.

“It’s OK to belong to Europe, but I do not want to be governed by them,” said David Richards, 56, a tourist from Lincoln, England, on vacation in Dublin.

Citizens across the continent complain they have no direct power to influence EU treaties, which are produced in legalese too complex to understand. They say it’s not enough that their elected governments help to negotiate such treaties.

Would-be voters in France and the Netherlands appear particularly annoyed on that score. Majorities there thought they had registered powerful statements against EU accountability by shooting down the EU’s proposed constitution in 2005.

Instead, most of the constitution’s rules for reshaping EU institutions and decision-making procedures reappeared in new packaging two years later, when all 27 governments signed the Lisbon Treaty in the Portuguese capital.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose country assumes the rotating EU presidency next month and is saddled with keeping the Lisbon Treaty alive, on Saturday said “this Irish hiccup” should not affect other governments’ in-house ratifications.

But Sarkozy conceded that voters throughout the bloc were liable to shoot down the high diplomacy of EU insiders, if given the chance. Sarkozy said the European Union “was set up to protect. And yet it worries so many Europeans … I take the Irish ‘no’ as a call for us to do things differently and … better.”

What it proposes

The new treaty would increase powers for the EU president and foreign policy chief, prune the commission from 27 to 18 members — resulting in only two-thirds of the countries being able to nominate one of their own members in any given term — and trim the policy areas where a holdout nation can block a decision.