On Sunday, the people of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania cast votes that carry weight beyond their state's borders, as a close contest between the center-left Social Democrats and the far-right AfD unfolds against a backdrop of genuine but uneven economic progress. The region has grown faster than Germany as a whole since 2020, yet wages remain thousands of euros below the national average — a gap that reminds us how statistics and lived experience can tell very different stories. In a country still reckoning with the long shadow of its eastern states' post-reunification journey, this election a