No government should be using big tech products. It's essentially corruption IMO. There are so many smaller, cheaper, better alternatives. And these days, building software is not that difficult. There are a lot of open source stacks to start with.
Maintaining it is.
The problem with Europe is that they starved their tech sector completely. IMO neglectful to the point of corruption. The salaries of EU-based engineers was just laughable compared to US. And they outsourced a lot of the software work to foreigners and basically ended up with low quality solutions, compromised by foreign nations from all sides. In terms of tech, EU governments have been extremely incompetent... They could not have failed worse if they tried. So now there is a lot of fixing to do. Radical fixing.
Is that very different than the US? That seems more like a timeless endeavor, not a European tech one.
But then I guess the argument could be made for that you should go for the best option possible, as long as it's within EU, and I can certainly see the point of that too.
Governments are organizations like many others, with similar needs. Almost all need to be purchased in the marketplace. Is every purchase from a business, even a large business, corruption? What about cars? A phone system? Electricity?