Simple. The former is economic warfare against the US, under pretense of the EU “parliament” giving a hoot about its constituents. The latter is plain old fascism.
Forking Emacs on such grounds is a symptom of ego malfunction. The proper step (after diplomacy has failed, which it hasn't yet in this instance) is to author an alternate implementation of the feature in Emacs Lisp and publish it.
I have a hard time putting faith in that “balkanization theory” from the '90s anymore. A fork gains traction if and only if it manages to get ahead of the mainline feature-wise, and stay there, by a sufficiently wide margin for customers to overcome their inertia. We'll see whether this ~eshel person manages to pull that off, or not (my money is on “not”.)