This article assesses the extent to which European governments’ legal strategies (i.e. the choices of and changes in the legal foundation(s) authorising executive action) to address the COVID-19 pandemic enhanced executive autonomy to the detriment of parliamentary policy-making power, defined as the formal ability of parliaments to constrain executive rule making. Approaching the reduction in parliamentary policy-making power as one indication of ‘executive aggrandisement’, it contrasts the prominent claim in the literature that populist governments tend to use emergencies to weaken formal checks on executive power with a hypothesis derived from research on crisis policy making, associating such tendencies with unified executives lacking internal checks and balances. Assessing six European governments’ legal strategies between January 2020 until the present (spring 2021), the formal weakening of parliaments’ role in law making was – overall – more pronounced among ‘unified executives’ than governments including major populist parties, pointing to a source of ‘democratic vulnerability’ in emergency situations transcending Central Eastern Europe.