Parlamentarismo e Democracia na Terra dos Presidentes

Abstract

The present article starts from the understanding that the Federal Constitution, by determining the realization of the Plebiscite, raised the parliamentarist question as a current political issue of national interest. Even considering that the destines of the country and a value of principles are not being decided upon, the author emphasizes the fact that this is a problem with strategical dimensions and therefore it should be focused as such.

In the first section, the author criticizes what he calls "historical parlamentarism", aiming at analysing the conservative values that underlie it. Thus, he intends to reinforce the intellectual premises leading to the necessary change of government form, so that it assumes democratic and progressive characteristics.

Then, he strives to demonstrate that, in Brazil, the hypercentralization of Executive Power, which presidentialism implies, is associated to a unaccomplished citizenship for it leads to the exclusion of popular in relation to their public rights and political reactions. According to his opinion, the presidentialist form of government established a "heteronomy" through which the nation receives the executive´s determinations wihich it is submited to as form a principle exterior to the nation´s formal representation.

Finnaly, after having considered the positions of the socialism movement regarding the so-called bipartition of government forms, he deffends that the implementation of parlamentarism, as a consequence of the juridical and forma autonomy of civil society, will represent a wider democracy at the level of the political regime. But the warms: this will be possible only if this project does not capitulate to institutional inertia and it is not followed by opposite vectors in the field of the electoral system.