The AfD's victory in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern was so total that election officials in Schwerin were forced to requisition every can of blue paint in the state to colour the bar chart, which now stretches from the state parliament building to the Baltic coast. The party's lead over the SPD was measured not in percentage points but in kilometres of painted plywood, a unit the state electoral commission adopted on the spot because no existing metric could contain the result.
The CDU, meanwhile, failed to clear the five-percent threshold for the first time in its history, prompting a nationwide search for the missing votes. Volunteers combed the fields of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern with metal detectors, while party officials in Berlin held a candlelit vigil outside the chancellery, waiting for the missing five percent to turn up. «We have checked every sofa cushion in the country,» a party spokesperson said. «We are now prepared to check the sofa cushions of neighbouring countries.»
In response to the scale of the defeat, the CDU announced a mandatory retraining programme for all members, who will spend the next six months standing in town squares holding signs that read «We Are Still Here» while being pelted with soft fruit by passing schoolchildren. The party's youth wing has been tasked with counting the votes again, by hand, using an abacus carved from a single oak tree felled in the Black Forest.
The AfD, for its part, has begun construction of a victory arch in Schwerin made entirely of blue-painted traffic cones, which will be inaugurated at a ceremony where the party's candidate will read aloud the names of every town that voted for them, in alphabetical order, until the sun sets. The SPD has announced it will hold a counter-ceremony featuring a single red balloon.