ABSTRACT
Accounts of the events which took place in the months leading up to the 1995 presidential campaign, of the campaign itself, and of the outcomes can be summarised as a long list of surprises: from the list of candidates, to the voters’ interests, from the thrust of the campaign to the electoral results themselves. Two institutions can be said to be responsible for spreading most of the errors in forecasting and in interpreting voters’ expectations: the media and the political analysts. The links between public opinion on the one hand, and voters on the other, have not been established scientifically, and they are not stable – one of the factors preventing the use of political opinion polls in anticipating the outcome of a vote. ‘Public opinion’ is a vaguer notion than ‘voters’, and manifests itself in a considerably wider range of ways.
