por Christian Lynch e Jorge Chaloub
The current Brazilian Constitution turned 30 years old in October 2018. However, the anniversary went almost unnoticed outside the legal circles. The feeling that the New Republic, regime founded in 1985 which it helped to structure, ended after a five-year agony (since 2013), was like a cold-water bath on the Balzacian’s anniversary. The New Republic had been ideologically anchored in certain progressive consensuses, due to the leading roles played by two parties – the ‘toucan’ Brazilian Social Democracy Party (Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira [PSDB]), center-right, and the ‘red’ Workers’ Party (PT), center-left –, both of them grounded in a coalition presidentialism in which each party willing to support the administration got a portion of the public machine in the Brazilian Ministries Esplanade. All this is about to vanish, or some people intend it to disappear. What Brazil is facing today consists in the resurgence of a conservative coalition, against which the New Republic, at first, was built up, joined by military party statists; culturalists belonging to churches of Christian denominations; and neoliberal economists. So, given the above, throughout the year, what was asked in the political and legal circles was whether the Constitution would survive. After all, throughout Brazilian history, regime changes have only happened in scenarios of acute political crisis, marked by a sense of accumulated wear and tear of the constitutional machine. And, in fact, the Constitution’s credibility has been harshly attacked in recent years, since it is not possible to distinguish the political regime from the legal text that serves as a roadmap for its organization, signaling the mode of relationship between the three powers of the Republic, the federalism model, the presidential government system, etc. Another symptom of the novelty of the present day is the mobilization of constitutional institutes of exception, which seemed to exist in the Constitution as a mere remnant of its predecessors and had never been invoked before. Casting out the repeated impeachment process 25 years after the first one, when the regime was not consolidated, yet, in February 2018 a federal intervention was decreed for the first time since 1966, which in turn forced the convening of the Republic Council, never assembled before to deliberate. With all this in view, if regime change proves to be a reality, as it seems, then it is the case of asking: will our Constitution die or live?
Palavras-chave: Constituição; Ciência Política.