The EU isn’t a continent, and the dictators you mentioned didn’t control EU countries.

My wording was awkward, but I think the meaning is clear. "...in the EU--the union of countries primarily located in a continent that..." ?

And what am I missing? They were dictators of Spain and Greece respectively. There are millions of people who can remember their rule alive in those EU countries today. What changed in the last fifty years to make a recurrence impossible? Turkey narrowly missed joining, and it's basically there now. Hungary seems well on its way.

The threat of being suspended from the EU and the (potential) economic damage from that? You can’t be a dictatorship and keep the same rights in the union, as per the Copenhagen criteria and Article 7.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copenhagen_criteria#Political_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_7_of_the_Treaty_on_Eur...

Article 7 doesn't seem to mean anything does it?

Spain just crushed a political movement trying to organise a referendum through force. It arrested the leaders and the rest of the EU is helping them catch the ones that fled. They call it a rebellion and state that Catalonia can never be independent.

Not an Article 7 violation, apparently. According to the EU it's merely an internal matter.

Hungary elects a government by a wide margin, it's a popular government, and the government reflects its people's disagreement with EU policies that aren't in any treaties and weren't in anything Hungary previously agreed to. This is apparently a violation of "rule of law" and "not democracy".

The EU's definition of democracy is anything that helps the EU, simple as that.

You are trying to justify a coup. A coup by a minority of the population that has a distorted view of history as a result of years of astroturfing.

So if applying the law is "crushing a political movement", let's crush it all the way. Nobody is above the law.

I didn't actually take sides or try to justify anything, just pointed out the contrast.

However a coup is a military overthrow of a government. What the Catalonians tried to organise is a vote, not a coup.

And Russia considers itself to be a democracy. There's a big gray zone between good government and a self-admitted dictatorship. Smart modern authoritarians know that they need to maintain the pretense of democracy (for reasons like the one you note), and they do a passable job--look at something like Cambodia. That's what makes tools to exert personal power while still complying with the law as written so important.

Why do you think the GDPR needs to give the government that much power? For a simple example: Why is 20M EUR the right statutory maximum? If the regulators would never enforce it, then why does it need to be so high?

Because otherwise some companies might conclude that it is cheaper to continue to violate the law and simply to pay the fine. See Volkswagen, which got fined billions for violating the law (and rightly so), and they're still in business and have not withdrawn from the markets where they were fined. But it looks as if they did learn their lesson (for the next 30 years or so, this wasn't the first time they got caught with something like that).

Volkswagen-sized companies would be subject to the 4% of revenue limit, since that's >20M EUR. That 4% seems high to me, but not insane.

The 20M seems insane to me. If the standard for smaller companies were e.g. 100% of the last five years of revenue plus 50k EUR, then can you imagine a case where it would be cheaper to violate the law and keep paying the fine? That would be a lot less menacing to small, non-commercial or semi-commercial projects.