France’s love-hate relationship with opinion polls is in the spotlight after a newspaper announced it would stop commissioning polls in the run-up to the French presidential election and instead do more on-the-ground reporting to sound out the public mood, reports The Guardian.
The unprecedented decision by the daily Le Parisien came after months of discussion in the paper’s newsroom following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s election in the US – both of which caught media and some pollsters by surprise.
Polls show the French presidential election is likely to see the rightwing Les Républicains candidate, François Fillon, face off against the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen in the final round.
But, with the maverick, independent centrist Emmanuel Macron making gains while the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon eats into the Socialist party electorate, there is no certainty over who will make it to the final runoff.
“Rather than just talking about what some see as errors in the polls, we’ve decided to go back to the core of our profession: going out in the field, proximity to people,” said Stéphane Albouy, editor of Le Parisien, which with its sister paper, Aujourd’hui en France, was historically among the biggest media users of political polls, which often dominated their front pages.
“I’m not attacking opinion polls,” Albouy added. “They don’t do their job badly – they give a snapshot. The problem is the way the media uses them.” He said he wanted his newspaper to stop obsessing about the “horse race” element of which candidate was in top position and do more in-depth reporting on the public mood and policy platforms.