The COVID-19 outbreak has posed an unprecedented challenge for contemporary democracies. Despite the global scale of the problem, the response has been mainly national, and global coordination has been weak. National governments have made use of exceptional powers to enforce lockdowns, often sacrificing civil liberties of all sorts, nurturing fears of an authoritarian turn. In this paper, we study citizens' responses to the democratic dilemmas the pandemic has . We present results from a set of survey experiments embedded in five survey waves conducted from March 2020 to September 2021, together with longitudinal evidence from a panel survey fielded right before the pandemic. Our findings reveal a strong initial increase of preferences for a national as opposed to a European/international response, widespread demand for strong leadership, willingness to give up individual freedom, and support for technocratic governance, much stronger for the COVID-19 crisis than for other global problems, such as climate change or international terrorism. Most of these sharp initial changes, though, seem to be slowly vanishing, except for mass public preferences towards technocratic and authoritarian government, which seem to remain high. We discuss to what extent this crisis may contribute to a shift towards a new, self-enforcing political equilibrium.