The exists to protect the Constitution. But what we see is a supreme functional inversion: the dominant objective for many of its members has become to protect themselves. Ensure your own survival. This survival mode is particularly striking in the case of the Supreme Court, but it has become a pattern that crosses Brazilian institutions: Executive, Congress, Judiciary, parties and even control bodies. The affair Master showed that the king is naked. The public perception of internal conflicts, decisions aimed at self-preservation and corporate responses becomes sufficiently widespread that it is no longer possible to sustain the same institutional narrative used since Lava Jato.
The current debate in political science about supreme courts focuses on two major questions: how courts limit governments and majorities and how governments seek to capture courts. It thus involves its counter-majoritarian action: the arbitration of Executive-Legislative conflicts and the protection of fundamental rights. And also the role of the courts in processes of democratic erosion, especially in the face of attempts by the Executive to capture them. But among us there is also a singular issue that enhances the others: a crisis of legitimacy triggered by serious signs of irregularities in the . It was this that triggered the survival mode of the institution’s recent operations.
The court stops acting as an arbiter of the political system to act as an actor interested in its own preservation and individual survival of ministers. It is the displacement of the court’s own actions towards the management of its legitimacy crisis. But the mode of survival is not purely institutional, but individual, although it coexists with the existence of internal factions and consequently with . All of this is unprecedented and has no parallel in other courts or in the court’s own history.
The STF is just the most visible case, not the only one. In survival mode, there is a diversion of functions: institutions gradually begin to operate largely in a way that is detached from long-term collective objectives. Thus, the Executive Branch begins to guide government actions exclusively towards short-term political objectives. The repercussions on the country’s economy and public policies are dramatic. In the Legislature, these problems are exacerbated by the so-called logic of collective action and its consequences. In fiscal terms, this pathology has a name: the tragedy of the commons. The Executive rhetorically denounces the problem because it would like to have a monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.
With both Powers, the same logic of self-preservation characterizes a pattern of widespread institutional degradation. The case of the supreme court is more serious due to the place it occupies in the institutional system: the court has the last word. The system will collapse when its decisions are not fulfilled.
Survival mode produces exactly the . The more an institution seeks to protect its legitimacy through closure strategies, the more it feeds the public perception of loss of legitimacy.
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