This study investigates citizens’ perception of the EU’s and member state legitimacy in two major crises of the last 15 years: the euro and debt crisis as well as the COVID-19 pandemic. By way of collecting and analyzing letters to the editors from the German daily newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) in the period 2010 to 2021, we examine the responsibility attribution to political actors, the overall tone of the letters as well as whether these are focused on the polity or policy dimension. The results of our study show how these perceptions of legitimacy of the EU and national executives that are expressed in the letters to the editor were debated differently in the two crises studied. In addition, we found that in particular with regard to the pandemic there was a clear focus on the national executive, and also that the crises provide a public opportunity to criticise how the political system works as a whole thus creating contestation of the legitimacy of the EU’s or national polity and not only concrete policy measures.