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.

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 right-wing 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 run-off.

“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 Stephane Albouy, editor of Le Parisien, which withits 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.

Not commissioning polls would also save the paper tens of thousands of euros, he said, adding that Le Parisien was still free to comment on other media’s surveys.

France has one of the highest rates of political opinion polling in the world. In the year leading up to a presidential election, there are typically hundreds of major national polls, with about one a day dominating headlines.

Even before recent international debate about media over-reliance on polling following the Brexit and Trump votes, as well as the 2015 UK election and Israeli elections, French commentators were questioning their national media’s addiction.

Some French politicians have begun to publicly turn on the polling culture. “Welcome to the unpollable,” quipped Fillon in his new year’s address to the press this week, saying more information could be learned from listening to the “silent, feverish France” struggling on the periphery.

Fillon, currently seen as a favourite to win, had been written off as a no-hoper only months ago. He polled low throughout the right’s primary race to choose its candidate in November, then began to rise sharply in the polls in the last days of the campaign before securing a staggering win. His surprise victory helped him try to style himself as an underdog and outsider to the “system”, despite five years as prime minister and several decades in politics.

France has had key moments when it questioned the pertinence of polls, namely the 2002 presidential election when Jean-Marie Le Pen created a political earthquake by knocking out the Socialists and reaching the final round.

But polling still influences politicians’ choices, namely about whether to stand for election. Macron, the maverick former economy minister running as an independent for the presidency, decided to step into the ring bolstered by his good popularity ratings.

In 1995, the right-wing prime minister Édouard Balladur, encouraged by his good polling, ran in the presidential election only to be trounced by his party leader, Jacques Chirac. “France publishes a massive amount of opinion polls and that won’t stop despite Le Parisien’s decision,” said Yves-Marie Cann, political director at the Elabepolling group in Paris.

“The purpose of polls is to shed light on the public debate. They are a useful indicator but we always say they must not be the only indicator — on-the-ground journalism is just as important. We have to keep looking at the whole picture — including what is being said on social networks and what commentators are saying.”

—By arrangement with The Guardian

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2017