I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.
You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.
And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.
Maybe the statement isn't true for EU as a whole, but some member countries have far higher bar than what you describe. For instance in Spain the company must provide justification to the government before firing someone.
This is still possible in many European countries, especially less wealthy ones.
