@aral Very specifically, this is a German, not an EU, fuck-up. The German tax codes defines a very narrow, and very 1950ies view of what’s a charitable cause and the Federal ministry of finances has not been moving on this point at all. Notably, other charities with political intent had their previously granted status removed (check Campact for instance).
There’s another big issue with this in general, and that’s an EU issue: There is no way to set up an EU-wide charitable cause entity. So you’d have to run 27 entities to get tax deductability (is this a word?) in the entire EU.
While it’s sad to read this, it’s absolutely understandable that they took this step. The implications … yeah, yet another Mozilla or Wikipedia foundation with questionable priorities decoupled from the actual project.
But please bash the German government and only then the EU ;-)