The election campaign has largely become a polling campaign.
Everyone knows that surveys only contain snapshots that don't even have to be correct.
Nevertheless, it is almost impossible to evade them - especially the polling institutes, which deliver a week-long race between demoscopic herd instinct and overbidding competition, cannot do it.
It is not the quality of the arguments that is the measure of all things, but surveys of candidates and parties, the results of which are taken at face value.
The result are excesses of the democratic vote and a criticism of the “empty” election campaign, where there is no emptiness, which is in love with tactical considerations.
The survey institute Forsa did not want to be satisfied with that.
The votes that have already been cast are tempting for pollsters: those of the postal voters.
Evaluating their voting behavior would have driven the questionable electoral law of the mass postal vote to extremes.
But Forsa would have completely become the druid of the federal election.
Does Freedom of Information Reach the Integrity of Suffrage and Freedom of Choice?
The Federal Returning Officer wanted to put a stop to this, initially in vain.
The Hessian Administrative Court has now pulled the emergency brake after Forsa was initially approved by the Wiesbaden Administrative Court on Thursday.
He suspended the administrative court's decision pending a decision on a complaint by the Federal Returning Officer.
Forsa had rejoiced over the short-term success before the court in Wiesbaden, because a ban would "result in a factual ban on the publication of polls from six weeks before the election date".
There can be no question of that - the institutes are happily continuing to publish after all.
But even if it were as Forsa sees it coming: what would be so bad about that?