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parliamentary election for an anticipated date. His opponents from the socialist party
easily led a winning coalition, which forced him to endure five years of near-passivity in
front of his new oppositional Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin. As it happens, the February
(1997) polls results had been so favourable towards Jacques Chirac that he assumed
that this support would remain constant for the next three months and thus was
prepared to wait for the anticipated election date. This deadly mistake cost the job of
the polling company director, Jerôme Jaffré. This appears extremely over-confident,
especially since it is now a well-known fact that undecided voters are making their
decisions later and later, sometimes even at the last moment as they enter the polling
stations.

Another recurrent problem of French pollsters is the constant underestimation of the
results of far-right politicians, and notably those of the notorious leader of the Front
National, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Compared to countries where only two or three main
parties exist, and thus encompass the majority of the votes, France has always had a
variety of smaller parties, and also of parties representing the whole range of the
political spectrum, from the communists and the Trotskyites to the far-right. As a
consequence, many French citizens, and notably those who are close to the ‘extremes’,
do not publicise their political beliefs, and even deliberately lie, even when questioned
by pollsters guaranteeing anonymity. Two decades ago, when the National Front and
other extreme parties were hardly getting any votes, this phenomenon did not matter.
But since the mid-eighties, Jean-Marie Le Pen and his party have been regularly getting
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between 12% to 15% of the votes, even 17% in 2002 .This means that, during the past
twenty years, pollsters have been forced to ‘manually’ modify their own results in trying
to assess how many ‘wrong’answers during the surveys had been given by people who
would then vote for the far right. Even with these empirical corrections, the number of
The Professionalisation of Political Communication
untruthful answers is still usually underestimated, probably because pollsters do not
dare to over correct the figures they obtain.

In spite of this knowledge, in 2002, Lionel Jospin and his team trusted the poll results as
much as Jacques Chirac had wrongly done in 1997. Since the polls’ results had been
similar for many months before the start of the campaign, clearly showing himself and
Jacques Chirac holding the two top positions for the first round, Jospin and his team
never thought that it could be otherwise, and thus never really took proper notice of
their ‘minor’ first round opponents, nor their two competing far-left neighbours, Arlette
Laguillet and Olivier Besancenot, nor the National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. This
made a pathway for Le Pen,as we now know.It must be noted here that the danger had
been correctly spotted by a few people in the final weeks of the campaign, notably by
Jospin’s main public opinion polls specialist, advisor Gérard le Gall, who was
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discourteously dismissed by the candidate himself and by his team . If Jospin’s
campaigning team had listened to these warnings and not given preference to the
pollsters, they may have realised the urgent need for a strong communication ‘blitz’ in
the closing weeks of the first round in order to change its outcome. Most of the
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