French press review 18 November 2016

Despite their obvious faults and the recent failure to predict either Brexit or Trumpit, opinion polls continue to be published, analysed and, broadly, believed. What do the pollsters say will happen in Sunday's French right-wing presidential primary and why should we believe a word of it?

In the wake of last night's final conservative debate, and just three days from the first round of voting in the presidential primary, Le Monde warns that we need to be careful in interpreting the results of the opinion polls.

Everyone learned that lesson with the shock victory of Donald Trump in the United States.

But, says Le Monde, Sunday's first round in the right-wing primary is especially difficult.

There are a few certainties, although we can be pretty certain that Jean-François Copé and Jean-Frédéric Poisson, with less than two percent of voting intentions betweern them in any poll so far, are unlikely to make a sudden surge to victory.

This is the first time the French right has organised a primary election and no one has any idea how many people will turn out to vote. But everyone agrees that the turnout will have a huge impact on the result: the more people who show up on Sunday, the wider the gaps between the top three contenders, Alain Juppé, Nicolas Sarkozy and François Fillon. If only five percent of the nation's 46 million registered voters cast a ballot, the gap between Juppé and Sarkozy closes to virtually nothing; with a 15 percent turnout, Juppé would leave the former president trailing in his wake by nearly 10 points.

The margin of error that makes opinion polls dangerous

People have, of course, been assuring the pollsters that they intend to vote. But when one agency asked those enthusiasts where they would be voting, 30 percent had no idea of the location of their polling station.

Le Monde also reminds us of the significance of the statistical term "margin of error," the inherent mystery at the heart of every opinion poll. French polling agencies work to a 2.5 percent margin of error. Meaning that, if Juppé is credited with 29 percent of votes and Sarko with 25 percent, the two men are in reality neck and neck at 27 percent each, and no one can say which of them is likely to win.

Le Monde has reduced the figures accordingly and still finds Juppé at the top of the pile next Sunday, narrowly ahead and likely to face Sarkozy in the second round. But that could also be Fillon.

Bland and predictable final debate

Right-wing daily Le Figaro sat through last night's final debate and wonders why it bothered.

The last clash of the seven candidates before Sunday's face-off at the urn was, according to the conservative daily, bland and predictable, as if none of the contenders wanted to take the risk of putting his or her foot in it just days before the first-round vote.

Le Figaro's readers' poll on the question of which candidate was most impressive last night is a clear victory for Fillon, with 48 percent of the 25,000 respondents finding that he was the star of an otherwise crummy show. Sarko gets an 18 percent Figaro reader approval; Juppé 16 percent.

That may be additional good news for Fillon, since one opinion poll published earlier this week had him beating Juppé in the second round, if Fillon can get that far. His strong performance last night won't have done that hope any harm at all.

Fillon refuses to mud wrestle on TV

Even left-leaning Libération concedes that Fillon did himself a lot of good, notably by refusing the presenter's closing invitation to the seven to have a go at one another. It might have been a good television idea, leading to the political equivalent of mud wrestling, but Fillon was not getting down and dirty. "This is not a show," he said from the height of his offended dignity, "we're here to explain our policies, not to provide a spectacle."

National Front warns of imminent attack by Martians

To return briefly to statistics, business paper La Tribune notes that the French far-right Member of the European Parliament Nicolas Bay has been using figures produced by the charity Doctors Without Borders to back his claim that the vast majority of migrants arriving in France are not refugees from a war zone, but Africans looking for a better standard of living.

Bay says Doctors Without Borders interviewed 10,000 migrants, 53 percent of whom admitted to being economically motivated, with only 14 percent saying they were fleeing war. And all of that is true.

The National Front has since published those figures on its official site.

The problem is that the results have nothing to do with France, being based on a study of 11 European Union countries and Turkey. The question of motivation was never posed to migrants arriving in France.