Several meetings

Pollsters disagree on EU election

Once again, the red-white-red opinion polls are in turmoil. Several institutes were way off the mark with several forecasts on the election weekend - the "Krone" reported. Even before the result was known, there were apparently also several differences of opinion among themselves. 

When opinion pollsters have different opinions, they apparently don't like to deviate from their own. This is what happened on the election weekend, as several sources independently reported to "Krone".

"Different values and opinions"
On election day, but also the day before, there are said to have been meetings between Peter Hajek (Unique Research), Christoph Hofinger (Foresight), Matthias Hinner (ARGE Wahlen) and Paul Unterhuber (Demox), at which the respective values and assessments were exchanged. 

The differences of opinion between the pollsters reached their high and low point at 4.20 pm on election day. All institutes had their values, analyzed and compared them. Peter Hajek's result is said to have differed - as reported - from the others. Due to the differences, he is even said to have considered not making his data available for the first trend forecast at 5 pm.

In the end, however, he did and told the "Krone" the day after the election: "We slightly overestimated the Freedom Party". The fluctuation margin had to be taken into account. It was between 26 and 34 percent. The FPÖ ended up with 25.36. "Admittedly, that was slightly off the mark. We got the other parties absolutely right."

Fear of embarrassment
Explosive: The original plan of the pollsters was also to venture a new trend forecast on election night at 7 pm. "If we correct our forecasts and then it's not right, we'll embarrass ourselves even more," one pollster interjected. The others ultimately agreed - and the provisional final result at 11 p.m. still held a few surprises, as we all know. 

Pollsters deny this
The pollsters reject the dissonance and explain in writing to the "Krone": "The trend forecast was drawn up consensually, professionally, amicably and, within the specified fluctuation range, ultimately in accurate agreement with the actual result." Hajek also denies that he did not want to make his trend forecast available.