“Opinion polls have replaced political programs” – Tahrir

The philosopher calls into question such approximate measures of opinion that margins of error are often neglected. Inflation, unemployment, or pandemic… She is also worried about the spread of “illiteracy” in terms of numbers while the memo system is spreading.

Traits of democracy or gravediggers, gauges of voting intent are omnipresent in the media in this in-between presidential election round. Before and after the ballot, democracy is dissected in the form of a hemisphere, pyramid or digital pie chart. As an incentive to vote or as a criterion for public action, figures from the commercial sphere have now invaded the entire political sphere, analyzes Valerie Charol, a philosopher and researcher associated with the Interdisciplinary Institute for Contemporary Anthropology (CNRS/EHESS). But this conquest of the economic sciences of human affairs should not necessarily render the citizen powerless in the face of irreplaceable quantitative truth. Getting rid of and knowing the rules on which these actions are based, including with regard to predicting elections, is a means – and a necessity – to regain control over them, and to overcome the illusory hope of their disappearance, as the philosopher advocated in Free yourself from the domination of numbers (Fayard, 2022).

What do you think of the first polls between the two rounds that gave Emmanuel Macron’s winner with a score of 51-54%, compared to 46-49% for Marine Le Pen?

I think we have to be very careful. Opinion polls are not a reflection or photograph of the electorate at some point, but a style, a vulgar, distinctly ambiguous: a sample of 1,500 or 2,000 people above 48 meters …