State election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania | Angry seagulls and smelly fish

Not appetizing for everyone: the CDU in the election campaign Photo: dpa/Jens Büttner Fish sandwiches and seagull attacks are a popular summer slump topic that is discussed emotionally in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania every year. Fish sandwiches now cost up to seven euros and feeding seagulls can cost up to a thousand euros, with repeat offenders up to 5,000. After all, the municipalities are cash-strapped and you can't plug all the potholes with speed camera money.

At the beginning of the election campaign in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, the CDU relied on a fish sandwich that was served against a blue background with the slogan: "The center is the best." By which the Christian Democrats meant themselves, but also the herring fillet with dill, lettuce leaves and onions. What other political content was in the fish sandwich was left to the taste of the voters.

The Left reacts to this culinary appropriation with a poster that shows the Chancellor eating a fish sandwich and claims: "The fish stinks from the head!" Aside from the fact that Friedrich Merz, for all his callousness, is not a fish: the need for reforms for the country's health, pensions and social systems is not refuted by the fact that the CDU is now even hiding its hapless Chancellor while eating a fish sandwich. The net debt figures for 2027 might have made voters in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania more thoughtful about whether they could still afford fish sandwiches next year.        

I was even more surprised by a Jusos poster that I discovered on a trip between Prora and Sassnitz at the end of August. Then a seagull flew swiftly towards a declaration of war that proclaimed in red letters: "You won't get our home."

At first I thought it was a Nabu poster that was directed against the new wind farm plans, which are being discussed on Rügen at least as emotionally as the prices for fish sandwiches. Because the Juso logo was printed quite small in the bottom left corner. But who shouldn't get whose home? We humans have that of seagulls, which is being destroyed by bed castles, LNG pipelines and wind farms, so that more and more of them are migrating from the coast to the cities?

But the SPD, which has ruled Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania for almost 28 years, played a significant role in this. And who was meant by “her”? The AfD and its voters? According to Forsa, the party was at 37 percent in the polls that week. Should that mean that the country would no longer be their home if the Social Democrats won? Was there then a risk of deportations to Saxony-Anhalt?

As always, when pathos takes precedence over content, things get mixed up here too. But the other parties also prefer vague metaphors. The AfD promises the “blue turn,” although locals are more likely to think of hard liquor than a change of direction. The Greens put up a poster: “Klaren Kante Grün”. Your top candidate goes one better: “With a clear edge and a broad chest!” When I think of a broad chest, I think of Min Herzing, the famous fish woman from the Warnemünde market. Which brings us back to the fish sandwich.

When you drive through billboard landscapes like this, you wonder, in view of the avenues becoming ever clearer, why so much cardboard and plastic is still wasted at a time when voting decisions are influenced by Instagram, Tiktok and X. Especially when the political messages on them are as simple as the apparently AI-generated smiles of the top candidates.

And where is the positive? According to recent surveys, the SPD and the Left are still closing the gap to the AfD. And a majority in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania sees education and schools as the country's biggest problem and not immigration.

Nevertheless: After the debacle in Saxony-Anhalt, we hear from the centrist parties that there can no longer be any “business as usual!” And then the “business as usual” phrases follow: “Explain politics better, listen better, take people along.” Where to, that remains a mystery. Which reminds me of a saying with which my Sassnitz uncle Paul responded to all those who, back in the GDR era, were telling him a yarn that was too transparent: “Dat vertell de seagulls!”

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