French pollsters break run of miserable vote forecasts

One recent poll shows 59 per cent intend to vote for Emannuel Macron, against 41 per cent for Marine Le Pen. Eric Gaillard / Reuters

Nice // After opinion pollsters failed to predict the outcomes of Britain’s referendum on leaving the European Union and the United States presidential election, French researchers are quietly congratulating themselves on the accuracy of their surveys in the race for the Elysee.

Remarkably, the major French polling institutions were not only broadly correct in their forecasts for the first round of voting on April 23, they also accurately forecast the order in which the four main candidates would finish.

This was in stark contrast to the pollsters who predicted Britain would vote to stay in the European Union last June or that Donald Trump would lose the US election last November.

In France, the favourite, independent centrist Emmanuel Mr Macron's 23.8 per cent share of the vote, — establishing him as the first-round leader — was just 0.2 per cent short of the figure calculated in a study of all surveys by the newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, a few days before the first round vote on April 23.

The same forecast put the far-right Marine Le Pen on 22.8 per cent. The final figure was lower, 21.4 per cent, but still well within the three per cent margin of error typically applied to opinion polls. The third and fourth-placed candidates, the conventional centre-right contender Francois Fillon and the far-left Jean-Luc Melenchon received 19.9 and 19.2 per cent respectively, only fractionally different to what the polls had predicted.

The accuracy of polling seems all the more impressive given that 22 per cent of voters did not bother to vote at all.

So how did the pollsters get it so right?

Yves Bardon, development director of the French global research firm Ipsos, said the industry was “in a process of permanent evolution” with highly professional, dedicated researchers striving to make poll findings as accurate as possible.

“The methods have progressed from face-to-face to telephone interviews and then on line,” he said. “In 1995, only two per cent of the French had internet access; now it’s 100 per cent of the young and 90 per cent of older people. It has been shown that people are more likely to say truthfully what they feel on line than on the telephone.”

Most polls are based on the responses of between 1,000 and 2,000 people. Mr Bardon said the more people that pollsters spoke to, the smaller the margin of error, though the numbers interviewed were dictated by client budgets. However, Ipsos ensured that even smaller samples were representative of the “electoral core”.

“For the first round, Ipsos polls correctly identified the rising support for Mr Melenchon and the trends showing the developing levels of support for Mr Macron, Mr Fillon and Ms Le Pen,” he said.

They got it right in the primary stages too, even forecasting that Francois Fillon would defeat the favourite, Alain Juppe, a former prime minister, to be chosen as presidential candidate for the centre-right party, Les Republicains.

On Sunday, the French will choose either Mr Macron or Ms Le Pen as their next president. For the first time in modern French history, the two major parties of left and right are not represented in this second, deciding round.

One recent poll shows 59 per cent intend to vote for Mr Macron, against 41 per cent for Ms Le Pen. This indicates Mr Macron’s lead has narrowed by three points since April 23, and many observers, including pollsters, consider the margin may well reduce further before Sunday.

“Voting blank” — entering the polling booth but not casting a vote for any candidate — is again expected to be significant.

Mr Macron himself has acknowledged that victory for him could well depend on people voting not for him, but against Ms Le Pen.

Many still regard her as an extremist despite her painstaking efforts to erase the labels of racist, anti -Semitic and fascist which still cling to the Front National, the party created by her father, Jean-Marie.

In an apparent acknowledgement of the lingering stigma, Ms Le Pen has stepped down temporarily as party leader to concentrate on broadening her appeal. Meanwhile, Mr Macron must also win over sections of both the left and right who have misgivings about his inexperience, his manifesto and his links to big business — he is a former investment banker — and to the deeply unpopular current president Francois Hollande. It is after all only nine months since Mr Macron left Mr Hollande’s government to form his own political movement, En Marche (Forward).

All of this presents a considerable challenge to the pollsters. But Bernard Sananes, head of the Elabe polling institution, is confident of maintaining the level of accuracy.

“The pressure has led us to be even more cautious than normal when publishing the results of surveys,” he said in the weekly business magazine Challenges.

French opinion polls generally became more accurate after 2002, when Ms Le Pen’s father confounded all expectations by reaching the second round (and was then soundly beaten by the centre-right Jacques Chirac).

Pollsters warn, however, that the role of their work is not to predict election results with 100 per cent certainty but to serve as a guide in a process where views and intentions can quickly change.