Diagnoses became frequent that there is a crisis of constitutional democracy, understood in this essay as a political regime whose elements are the existence of a stable and known legal- constitutional order, separation of Powers, free, periodic, and competitive elections, and in which the exercise of fundamental rights of political participation and opposition is secured. Such a crisis would be noticeable by the arrival to power of agents with autocratic bias in different national political contexts, among which many include Brazil. And, in the Brazilian context, in the face of what would be a scenario of democracy crisis, positions appear in defense of a democratic judicial activism, with the energetic action by the Federal Supreme Court serving as an antithesis to processes of corrosion of the Brazilian democracy. Considering such scenario, the essay proposes to investigate the crisis of democracy, diagnosing the current prevalence of processes of democratic erosion vis-à-vis autocratic collapses. Sequentially, after conceptualizing democratic erosion and autocratic legalism, it is proposed to characterize judicial activism not as a counterpoint to the crisis of democracy, but as an incremental factor to it, which strikes the rule of law and the separation of Powers, two of its nuclear elements.

Diagnoses became frequent that there is a crisis of constitutional democracy, understood in this essay as a political regime whose elements are the existence of a stable and known legal- constitutional order, separation of Powers, free, periodic, and competitive elections, and in which the exercise of fundamental rights of political participation and opposition is secured. Such a crisis would be noticeable by the arrival to power of agents with autocratic bias in different national political contexts, among which many include Brazil. And, in the Brazilian context, in the face of what would be a scenario of democracy crisis, positions appear in defense of a democratic judicial activism, with the energetic action by the Federal Supreme Court serving as an antithesis to processes of corrosion of the Brazilian democracy. Considering such scenario, the essay proposes to investigate the crisis of democracy, diagnosing the current prevalence of processes of democratic erosion vis-à-vis autocratic collapses. Sequentially, after conceptualizing democratic erosion and autocratic legalism, it is proposed to characterize judicial activism not as a counterpoint to the crisis of democracy, but as an incremental factor to it, which strikes the rule of law and the separation of Powers, two of its nuclear elements.