It has become virtually impossible to discuss developments in European politics without referring constantly to the concept of 'crisis' (Rhinard, 2019). Crises are now a recurrent element in European politics, even though EU-specific crises, such as the Euro-crisis, economic stagnation, refugee crisis, terrorist crisis and Brexit, have been trumped by eminently global crises, starting from the Covid-19 pandemic. Indeed, they are now so numerous and overlapping that it has become impossible even to characterize a solar year by attaching it to a specific crisis. This is certainly the case with 2021, which began with a massive response to the enduring Covid-19 crisis and ended with the emergence of a dramatic energy and inflation crisisnot to mention rising tensions at the time between Ukraine and Russia at the eastern boarder of the EU, which turned into a fully-fledged war in 2022.In the first months of 2021, the Covid-19 emergency still dominated the agenda, with lockdowns still in place or reactivated in several EU Member States, as well as anti-lockdown protests spreading across Europe. The most important part of the health policy response to the Covid-19 crisis took the shape of EU-coordinated vaccination campaigns; while, on the economic side, financial support for citizens and businesses was secured thanks to the prolonged suspension of the Stability and Growth Pact (SGP) and the parallel Pandemic Emergency Purchase Programme (PEPP) by the ECB, which allowed all EU Member States to keep borrowing as much as needed. In addition, the Next Generation EU (NGEU) and its Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) started to be implemented with a view to facilitate a longer-term recovery phase, in line with the pre-Covid-19 strategic priorities of Ursula Von der Leyen's agenda when she started as President of the Commission. In the first part of the year, two more lingering crises attracted the attention of policy makers: the continuing negotiations on the post-Brexit UK-EU agreement and concerns on the respect of the rule of law in some Member States. More specifically, from March 2021 both Hungary and Poland staged a manifold challenge against the so-called Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation.However, at the end of the summer of 2021, Covid-related policy issues regained centrality, as doubts on the efficacy of vaccines started to circulate more widely in public opinions and some national vaccination campaigns were pushed into coercion. The EU Digital Covid-19 Certificate (soon dabbed Green Pass), which was meant to protect the right to travel freely across EU Member States, was used by some governments in a restrictive way, introducing rules against unvaccinated citizens at a domestic level. These extraordinary national policies generated strong reactions and protests in and across the interested countries, exacerbating the debate (which was until then limited to lockdown