After months of criticism of José Félix Tezanos for the electoral polls published by the Center for Sociological Research (CIS), the president of the institution has vindicated himself this Tuesday in an interview on RNE after the failure of the majority of previous polls to guess the results of the general elections on Sunday. Tezanos has valued his work and has indicated that his data was “very close to reality” and that “all the surveys failed except the CIS.”

The president of the CIS has been repeatedly accused by the right and by related media of constantly favoring the left bloc in the electoral barometers that estimate the citizens’ vote every month for the general elections. Above all, it was criticized that the public body polls almost always gave victory to the PSOE when at the same time several private polls gave it to the Popular Party.

Tezanos has commented that since he arrived at the CIS “there has been furious criticism by political and communication sectors”, however he has added that he is not “one of those who throw in the towel” or “bend” before the accusations that have been made. The socialist has pointed out that the flash poll that the CIS took out on July 17 was the electoral poll that most hit this 23-J. According to Tezanos, the data from the center were deviated by only “a few tenths”, so the distance between his study and the final results is “very small”.

The last survey published by the CIS before the general elections estimated a victory for the PSOE with 32% of the support of the voters, compared to the 30% that he predicted for the PP. With 99.73% of the vote counted, it can be seen that the CIS data has missed its estimate of the PP by three percentage points and that of the PSOE by one point.

The poll assigned the third position to Sumar with 14% of the votes compared to the 12.31% that the formation of Yolanda Díaz has finally achieved. Vox as the third force achieved 12.39% of the support, two points above the estimates of the CIS, which placed it as the fourth force.

Tezanos has assessed that electoral polls, contrary to what one might think, are not a “precision instrument of Swiss watchmaking”, so “they only serve to set trends”. The president of the CIS considers that in the case of barometers “you don’t have to believe them much” because they “always” have a theoretical margin of error.

Faced with the accusations that he has faced during these months, Tezanos has indicated that he “is not the CIS” and comments that when his person is criticized, the number of professionals, professors and officials who make up the public body and who keep it “in operation” are “discredited”.