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The EU today sits uncomfortably at the boundary between administrative governance and supranational constitutionalism. To date, however, the unwillingness of Member States to equip the EU with an autonomous power to mobilise fiscal and human resources in a compulsory fashion has cast serious doubt on the EU’s autonomous constitutional character. The EU’s fractured “metabolic constitution” among the Member States— that is, the polycentric manner in which resources are mobilised toward the ends of European integration—leaves the EU unable to transcend its own socio-legal and socio-institutional limitations as a form of administrative governance. The most fundamental limit flows from the disconnect between power and legitimacy, by which we mean the repeated conferral of regulatory power on European institutions, albeit without the EU enjoying the necessary democratic and constitutional legitimacy to support the exercise of those powers through autonomous mobilisation of resources. This contribution explores how the break in this necessary “power-legitimacy nexus” has manifested itself in EU governance over the last decade, most importantly in the Eurozone crisis. We then examine whether the response to the coronavirus pandemic (most importantly, the Next Generation EU recovery instrument) may constitute a paradigm shift — a “critical juncture” — in the EU’s fractured metabolic constitution. In conclusion, we consider what might need to happen in order to transcend the boundary between administrative and constitutional power in European governance.