The term illegitimate , from the Latin illegitĭmus , allows you to qualify that or that which is not legitimate : that is, that lacks legitimacy. What is legitimate, in turn, is fair , genuine or lawful.
For example: “Two minutes before the end of the match, the judge validated an illegitimate goal by the visiting team” , “Opposition leaders affirmed that the recent electoral process was illegitimate since the provisions of the National Constitution were not respected” , “ According to the court, the agreement signed by both parties is illegitimate.”
Take the case of a country in which a democratic government is overthrown by the armed forces through a coup d'état . The de facto rulers, upon gaining power, call elections, but with the main political parties banned and with numerous leaders imprisoned through irregular judicial rulings. After an electoral process without international recognition and with the participation of less than 40% of the voters, a new president is proclaimed. However, for the majority of the population, analysts and the world community, he is an illegitimate leader . The new president has no political or legal support to exercise his functions.
An illegitimate child , on the other hand, is someone whose parents are not married . Long ago, these descendants used to be discriminated against and lacked the rights that children of an established marriage enjoyed. Nowadays, however, it is common for legislation to protect people born out of wedlock, giving them access to inheritance and the rest of the rights corresponding to heirs.
The term illegitimate and its antonym, legitimate , are often the focus of confusion with the legal and illegal duo, although there are several differences that separate them. It is worth mentioning that for the field of politics and law, this has been essential since time immemorial. Let's start by defining the concept of law: it is the set of rules that we must comply with in order not to receive a sanction . The law can be reflected in writing or remain in oral tradition, but it always establishes a "framework" that we must respect.
That said, we understand that every legal act complies with this set of rules, and this can be exemplified by the correct use of traffic lights or garbage containers on public roads, among hundreds of other cases. Now, the complexity begins when legal but illegitimate acts are noticed; For example, although making fun of an elderly person is not a crime, it is illegitimate behavior .
In the previous example we can see that morality is not always related to legality; In fact, some laws seem to pursue a reality quite far from morality, always with the excuse of maintaining order in the context of a society. If we think about the abusive conditions that low-income people must endure to get a plate of food or a mattress, we understand that the judicial system does not seek a world of smiles and equal conditions.
Traveling a few centuries into the past, we have several cases of brutal acts that were considered legal at the time but, from our current perspective, are undeniably illegitimate. A clear example is the persecution suffered by the Jewish people in Europe, a part of history that led to the most extreme and regrettable examples of violence. Despite what we may feel when we read about it, in Nazi Germany it was mandatory to denounce Jewish neighbors; in fact, not doing so was considered a crime . In other words, sending an innocent person to a horrible death preceded by a series of abuses impossible to imagine was legal.