They are not incompetent (*), they are sponsored and they need sponsorship because elections. You might call it bribing - sometimes it is bribing - but in most of the cases is just lobbying. Consider that in Europe, lobbying and bribing are riskily similar but in USA are two completely different things and lobbying is plain licit. Guess what? Many US software companies are from US.
The problem about office suite
The OpenOffice adoption in Europe because open-source is good makes no sense in a real-world, like the one depicted above. Not all public offices can have a IT specialist that provide assistance for OpenOffice, and OpenOffice does not came with an embedded cloud service, etc.
Moreover, many documents - for decades - have been written in a closed-source proprietary undocumented formats that OpenOffice cannot always open. This is not completely true but if OpenOffice does not open correctly a old .doc file, people complain while they do not complain if the same or worse result is achieved by Microsoft Office because if MS Office cannot do, then no one office suite can do.
Moreover, many people are used to use the Microsoft Office UI and they do not want to change because OpenOffice. You might argue that between MS Word '97 and MS Word 365, the UI gap is equally wide between MS Word 97 and OpenOffice but - again - people complain about OpenOffice and not because Microsoft Office upgrade.
You should not even have to bribe politicians but just promoting and amplify the vox popouli.
The fault of the EU politics
The EU bureaucracy fault is having provided a norm for which every office suite should be able to export a document in a open-format. Nope.
Every office suite should save and load in a specific open-format documented by e.g. Fraunohoffer Institute or Sorbona University IT department or whatever (can it be LaTeX? Or something better?).
Every office suite should be able to produce PostScript output to print the document and the printed document should be equal to its preview (after all, this is the main goal for an office suite).
Every office suite should be able to produce a compressed size-oriented output for electronic transmission and long-term not-modifiable backup (PDF could be that format as far as Adobe provide full documentation and standardization for free).
When the EU laws will impose these restrictions in order to achieve an true open-data norm, the IT world will be a better place whatever people will use proprietary or open-source office suite.
The HTML is a standard. Otherwise, one of the most interesting and business-like part of Internet the WWW would not have been even existed. Well, to be precise: the HTML is a standard by W3C but many browser render it in a different way and sometimes accept out-of-standard additions. We all know how much pain this have been caused in the past.
After more than 30 years since the invention of Internet (1990, CERN by Berners-Lee) the open-data format is still an utopia. This is the EU fault. The US anti-trust that forced IBM to open the AT standard did a great thing for personal computer evolution and adoption plus created one of the most precious market that lasted for more than a decade (now hardware is a commodity, apart for specific uses).
Politics is for society, not for technology
Whatever you might think. In the new world of information (1990) politics is not anymore a solution, is not anymore an answer, it is just a problem - a big invalidating handicap - because there is nothing to discuss about. The open-data is a strict necessity, only a public entity can provide a standard for a type of data (word, excel, powerpoint, etc.) like HTML and W3C or EtherCat by Fraunoffer Institute, etc.
As you can see, there is nothing that politics can decide because everything is out of their competence, out of their duty and out of their control but they have a great interest in IT because money which means sponsorship in the best case and bribing in the worst.
We need to understand this, and cut them off completely. Yes, many people here that cannot write code or design an open-standard will be cut out any decision and every participation.
Politics call this: digital gap. The correct term is digital handicap. Fix you handicap and came with us hiking the mountain. You cannot ask IT guys to bring down the mountain to let you jump on top of it. About the sidewalks, is fair and even a social obligation to raised down the steps to let people with a kind of handicap being independent. Not for mountains.
Politics is about society. Not about technology. It can be useful for the society, it is a damn damage for the technology. You might argue that technology can affect society. Yes, it is right, this is the reason because politics is in charge to enforce standards - not to develop or decide which standards.
Notes
(*) They are not incompetent, at least not in general. The Italians are almost also incompetent but it a rarity rather than a common characteristics. It depends by the fact that Italy has just only 20% of population with a bachelor degree (or better) compared to 40+% of other countries - and with such a low percentage of highly-educated voters - being incompetent is something like being “one of us” for 80% of the italian voters.