The successive and overlapping crises faced by the EU over the last years have led researchers to identify a new modus operandi in EU policymaking, that of emergency politics (Kreuder-Sonnen & White, 2022) or crisisification (Rhinard, 2019). A central argument in this literature is that crises are exploited to expand EU authority. However, we lack comprehensive empirical evidence testing whether crisis narratives enable EU authority expansion and whether this can be attributed to an exploitation of crisis narratives. This study is the first to test these claims over the span of 5 legislative periods using data from the ParlLawSpeech dataset, which links 6,900 bills, 6,600 laws, and 590,000 transcribed and Google-translated speeches from the European Parliament (1999-2024). First, I estimate emergency emphasis in speeches through a latent semantic scaling model (Rauh, 2022) and a newly constructed transformer model. I furthermore disentangle crisis exploitation from crisis management byexploiting emergency emphasis variations between Eurosceptic and Europhile speakers. Next, I analyze the extent to which EU authority expansion, measured through law texts (Yordanova et al., 2024), is associated with parliamentary emergency narratives and how context-specific factors affect this relationship. Preliminary results show that increased emergency emphasis in parliamentary debates generally increases the extent to which laws expand EU authority, especially in policy areas in which the EU has little competence. My findings will shed light on how emergency narratives are related to EU authority expansion, highlighting the conditions under which crisis politics leads to genuine governance needs versus strategic exploitation of crises.