ABSTRACT
In Brazil, fascism has arrived, not through a classic coup d’état, nor through the exception, but rather from within the constitutional process itself, through the constitutional construction of a new legitimacy. The fascicizing Brazilian government does not exercise power through an external and violent change in the constitutional regime but rather through a weakening of civil liberties and a governance of the current Constitution. Or else by setting in motion a sort of functional constituent power, within its governance – absorbed within it and capable of making deep changes to the constitutional fabric. This perverse path of democracy, now successful in Brazil, but already experienced in part or whole elsewhere (Turkey, Egypt, for example, without mentioning former socialist countries) must be submitted to critique. We must ask ourselves not only what representative democracy still means today, but also what democracy means in general. How, in what forms, and with what objectives should those people committed to building and defending a Constitution that respects freedom and builds equality act? And finally, we should ask if it is possible to pose these questions at all, or rather, if the entire fabric of questioning must be renewed.
