The COVID-19 pandemic has drastically shown the importance of functioning governance. Countries where the political leadership initiated counter-infection measures at an early stage were able to protect their citizens comparatively well. According to the University of Oxford’s Coronavirus Government Response Tracker, diverse Arab countries such as Tunisia and Iran had relatively strict measures in place by mid-February 2021, while sanctions in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to name just two, remained largely indecisive. This paper understands the COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘systemic risk’ – i.e., highly complex and transboundary in nature with stochastic, largely uncontained trajectories that jeopardize essential systems. Prevalent literature on ‘risk governance’ highlights the importance of ‘systemic answers’ to such threats: governments and societies need a certain level of collaborative capacity to prevent major harm. In a most similar case design, this paper analyses the prevalent patterns of risk governance in four territorial MENA states: Egypt, Jordan and Morocco as authoritarian, lower-middle income countries, plus Tunisia as economically similar vulnerable, but more democratic complement. Following Gaskell and Stoker (2020), four fundamental governance qualities for successful risk governance will be applied to the respective COVID-19 responses: central and decentralized capacities, learning abilities and appreciating difference. The first two refer to the institutional setting of state administrations, the latter two hint at a necessary minimum ability of policymakers and citizens to (re)act flexibly. The responses to the pandemic result from two overarching independent variables: functional leadership (= the performance of policymakers) and socioeconomic potency (= the status of a society). These two conditions inform citizens’ behavior, both in terms of willingness and ability (dependent variable). The level of trust that a society has in its governance structures, works as an intervening variable. Most of the governance qualities required for successful risk containment have been modest in all four countries since decades. When the COVID-19 hit, their economies were already struggling to fulfil people’s basic needs, while political participation had been limited by security-focused, sometimes kleptocratic regimes. Thus, the paper will conclude which long-term effects the pandemic will probably have on the future interactions between the ruling elites and the citizens.