There have been software patents in the EU for decades. The section on "Europe" in the Wikipedia article on software patents (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patent) contains links to decent explanations of what's going on there.
It's not as "bad" as the situation in the US, but software patents have been issued in the EU for decades. The question of which software patents are actually valid and enforceable has been giving everyone a headache for just as long.
The European Patent Convention is somewhat ambiguous in its effort to both ban pure software patents, and permit some things that we might think of as software patents, meanwhile each country puts its own unique spin on the issue (the European patent system is not as unified as people sometimes expect), and courts do not always behave consistently.
In a way, it's an even bigger mess than we have in the US, the mess just doesn't get dropped in burning paper bags on doorsteps quite as much.
