In 2016 and 2020, Americans were hard pressed to escape election polls. From the whiplash of Trump’s obsessive tweets—“the polls are fake,” (Oct. 13) “poll numbers looking very strong,” (Oct. 16)—to news coverage saturated with the latest findings, the ever-shifting numbers were omnipresent. On Election Day, everyone watched in real time to see how predictions were lining up with exit polls.
But on the eve of the 2017 French presidential election, French citizens had to look internationally for their fix of data. A 32-hour legally enforced blanket of silence around the election fell over the country at midnight, just as it has since 1977 when the law was first passed. No campaigning, no statements from campaigns, and, perhaps strangest of all, no polling or publication of polls, on pain of a 75,000-euro fine. Political junkies had to settle for Swiss and Belgian reports, marked on social media with #RadioLondres, a reference to coded messages sent during World War II from a London-based radio station of the French Resistance.
