> Decades old mismanagement (governments use these "free" services to cater to their party members and get them nice administration positions for which they don't have any experience) and some outright corruption, destroyed the quality of most of these "free" services.

Tangential, but I recently visited lisbon and realized how terribly mismanaged the airport is, as well as TAP Air (Portugal's flag airline). Everything should be well, because it's a pretty big airport but yet it was a mess, and delays of several hours was apparently an every day experience (which I learnt the hard way). It did give the impression of having root causes in corruption and complete mismanagement of public funds.