In Seeing, the final installment of his magisterial urban trilogy, Jose Saramago offers an incisive dissection of our current political predicament. A few years after a strange episode of collective blindness, city administrators are preparing for a general election. The great day for the democratic festival is a miserably rainy Sunday, and once all the ballots are counted, it turns out that a large percentage of people have spoiled their votes. The city elites of the Party of the Left, the Party of the Middle, and the Party of the Right are disquieted, if not alarmed. Something must have gone wrong, these surmise, probably the bad weather … A week later, the elections are repeated. This time the weather is better, but the electoral outcome is even worse: 83 per cent of the citizens vote blank. What Saramago calls ‘the simple right not to follow any consensually established opinion’ deeply troubles the city government. One minister refers to it as a conspiracy against the democratic system itself. In its desperate attempt to understand what is going on, and to root out what must be an organised subversion against the sacrosanct democratic principle, the government declares ‘a state of emergency’, unleashing all manner of repressive tactics to uncover the masterminding source of the anti-democratic plot. But none can be found. In a final desperate attempt to make the city and its citizens come to their senses, the government decides to decamp to another place, leaving the residents to their own devices and anticipating a descent into anarchic catastrophe. However, nothing of the sort happens. Everyone goes about his or her daily life, and the city continues as normal.