The legitimacy crisis of brazilian representative democracy

could the law be conciliatory?

Abstract

Brazilian representative democracy is going through an unprecedented crisis of legitimacy. Despite the population's growing interest in political issues, the popular presence in the spheres of power is reduced, which intensifies the social tensions that politics should cool down. In turn, the legal system was placed (or placed itself) as responsible for overcoming that crisis, presenting solutions to political demands that no longer found answers in their natural environment. However, the legal system was not able to fulfill this supplementary role and ended up also launching itself into a crisis of legitimacy. Thus, the article will seek to identify the causes of these crises of legitimacy and point out ways to overcome them, in order to enable a recovery of the legitimacy of these two social fields so that, acting in an adjusted and related way, society can find the answers to its demands on their more natural environments. With this objective, the article proposes an analysis of the essential elements of a healthy democracy in contrast with the Brazilian political reality of the last decade, at the same time that it uses the ecological theory of law to understand the current relations between politics and law in the country, as causes and consequences of the referred legitimacy crisis. It also employs as a methodology the qualitative analysis of relevant data on the Brazilian political-electoral scenario, in addition to addressing works relevant to the proposed theme.