Ever since the outbreak of the global financial crisis (GFC) in 2007/2008, the European Union (EU) is confronted by a new reality of poly- and permacrisis which requires the EU to constantly adjust and reform. Crises management responses, however, vary in their legitimacy, which affects the evolution of the EU in the long term, and its resilience. In a previous publication in the context of the research conducted by the Jean Monnet Network ‘Crisis-Equity-Democracy for Europe and Latin America’, I focused on EU’s crisis management of the global financial crisis (GFC) and subsequent sovereign debt crisis (SDC) and showed that they were managed in an intergovernmental way, largely sidelining the European Parliament (EP) and national parliaments, creating a ‘double democratic deficit’ (De Souza Guilherme, 2020). This chapter compares the EU responses to the COVID-19 to the GFC, analyses and explains the paradigm change introduced in the financial management of the COVID-19 crisis, in particular, the creation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) in 2020, and focuses on democratic aspects of the crisis management at EU level. The articles highlights the role of the EP in this process and how it contributed to the input and throughput legitimacy of the response and concludes that the management of the COVID-19 crisis by the community method strengthened EU’s legitimacy and contributed to its resilience, reflecting and confirming Jean Monnet’s and Robert Schuman’s visions.