Say you have general elections. You have some regional politicians you can vote for etc, and maybe some of those people get into parliament. Some get in government, some don't. But once they get in parliament, they are responsible to their own party. Not you and me, just themselves. So they can do absolutely whatever they want, with no responsibility. You have absolutely no chance nor mechanism to recall or replace those politicians. Only their party can do it. So you've guessed it, we have "democracy" every 4 years. And each day between those elections we have oligarchy.

Back to our politicians. If they are in government, even better, they will introduce laws that will pretty much always pass (as the government has a majority, simple or 3/4 doesn't usually matter), nobody scrutinizes those laws and they will introduce stuff in them authoritarians have wet dreams about. Note here, I didn't say that the laws are written by complete morons, they are not. They are written specifically to introduce corruption, legalize what was criminal act before, or establish monopolies on trading goods or similar.

Eg. We have an army of inspectors. And a lot of stuff is left to "inspector's discretion". Or we have a lot of prohibitive clauses like: "you cannot build a house in an area less than 30m from the shore line. But you can do whatever you like if you get a special permit from the ministry (and that means the Minister himself). So yeah, you have mansions with private beaches all over. It just boils down to who you know and how much you can pay. If you're playing by the rules you're completely hosed and you're a fool, and I mean that. Too bad it took me 25 years to realize that.

So also you wonder why citizens don't do something to fight that? There are multiple reasons.

First, the government is the biggest employer by far. I don't know the fresh statistic but we have nr of government workers which is at least 4x larger than Germany's. And we have 4 million people. So there is a good chance that I'm working for the government or someone close to me is working (or even both). Say something bad, and you'll get fired, good luck getting another job.

Second, courts and judiciary branch is also corrupted and completely not responsible to citizens (at all!) so they do whatever they want or pass judgement whatever they want (especially in the case of high profile politicians). So no politician ever gets prison time. Ok, one got prison time out of hundreds of cases.

Third, people are not that hungry yet. There were some protests, but frankly, people here don't know how to protest. Even if people protest it is usually looked down upon them or they protest only for their benefit (say medical workers), not for a general problem.

Fourth, police is corrupted. They have no problem beating down insignificant people, and completely ignore ruling class.

All in all, it is a ugly spiral of bad things and I'm afraid it won't be solved until some war. War resets some laws, deals new cards, removes some bad guys as well (usually paid many times over by everyone else)...