EU and member-state responses to the Covid-19 pandemic involved emergency politics in a number of domains, including a) lockdowns, border closures and movement restrictions; b) steps towards Health Union; and c) the suspension of the fiscal rules and creation of the Next Generation EU and the Resilience and Recovery Fund. These raised major theoretical questions about legitimacy and the exercise of executive power during emergencies. This paper answers such questions by first considering democratic legitimacy in ordinary times in terms of the quality of governing activities related to output performance, input politics, and throughput procedures, as operationalized in terms of the ‘democratic audit.’ It next discusses the processes and problems of democratic legitimation in the EU with regard to leaders’ discourses of policy coordination and political communication. It then explores the complications for legitimacy and legitimation from emergency politics, and refines the democratic audit to apply to emergency politics. It follows by exploring how the exercise of executive power—coercive, institutional, and ideational/discursive—affects legitimacy and legitimation in emergency politics. Finally, the paper uses these theoretical criteria in a democratic audit of the empirical cases of bordering, health, and fiscal policy through process tracing and discourse analysis. It finds that governing authorities for the most part successfully discursively legitimated their actions on the grounds that positive output performance made up for reductions in political input and procedural throughput.