From a position not in favour, after the experiences in Europe in recent years both at European and national level, it is argued against the referendum as a procedure to settle complex political issues that claims to go beyond representative democracy. Starting from the ambiguities that the word «people» conveys, whether used as referring to a collective entity or to an aggregate of individuals, or used as denoting an active and present sovereign or a silent and sleeping political subject, the different scopes of the institution of referendum are discussed in relationship with these plural meanings of the notion of «people». Some mixtifications of this use in real political discourse, as in the case of Catalonia, are shown. The information problems and biases that are currently present in empirical referendums are examined, and the notion of wisdom of the people and some aspects of the alleged «epistemic» justification of democracy are mentioned. The requirements that are often demanded to accept this justification are too demanding to suppose that they can be met in a real referendum. Lastly, several problems that this political procedure entails are recalled: the possibility of conflict with other institutions of representative democracy, the difficulty of demanding political responsibility for people’s decisions, the rigidity of their decisions to be modified and the «suicidal» tendency democracy can feed when abandoned to this sort of procedures.