ABSTRACT
Since the early 1920s, from the seizure of power by Mussolini, Hitler and Franco in Europe to the Latin America, the history of democracy has been overshadowed by the threat of self-destruction. The collapse of the legitimation of democracy and the mounting influence of militant dictatorial movements are two sides of the same phenomenon which can be described as the ‘Weimar syndrome’. That the combination of representative and plebiscitarían elements, i.e. the fundamental problem of modern democracy, was not successful in the Weimar Republic, is due largely to the power of the presidential system over parliamentary democracy. The First German Republic was for far too many people a ‘provisional republic’. On the contrary, all great historical examples since the Paris Commune show the fundamental difference between representative pluralist parliamentary democracy and the plebiscitary and unique concept of democracy with its anti-pluralist, anti-representative and finally totalitarian consequences.
