Greece is trying to encourage entrepreneurs to invest and create well-paying jobs. But days before a general election, business owners say the state stands in the way.

Athens, Greece – When Iphigenia Zachou opened her café and bakery in Greece’s capital, she went through a bureaucratic wringer.

Renting a property and spending almost $40,000 of her own and her parents’ money on baking ovens was only the first step. She then had to upgrade the power line to take the load

“It took a lot of paperwork and a month to get an appointment,” she told Al Jazeera in advance of Greece’s general election on Sunday. “Then an engineer told me the whole pavement had to be dug up because the wiring was all wrong.”

It was the engineer who turned out to be wrong, but the back-and-forth cost two months.

More time was sacrificed dealing with the culture ministry, which has to license all businesses within a certain radius of the Acropolis in central Athens.

“Why should it take the culture ministry six months so I could open a café here? It’s a 1960 apartment building. It’s not as though they’re going to find antiquities,” Zachou said.

Another two months were spent claiming a tax rebate, she added, “because one person had gone on holiday”.

In all, her brush with public services cost seven months and increased her startup costs by $7,000.

“You get to the point where you’re trying to open a business, you’re giving people work, you’re part of the tourism industry, and the [public sector] treats you like a criminal. They look at you as though you’re trying to cheat,” Zachou said. “There’s none of the support I hear from friends abroad to open a business. The best case scenario is indifference.”

Faced with the threat of bankruptcy, Greece was forced to borrow 256 billion euros from the International Monetary Fund and its eurozone partners in return for balancing its budget.

Greece managed that feat in just four years, but the recessionary effect of sudden austerity cost it more than a quarter of its gross domestic product (GDP), the steepest post-war drop in a developed economy. State revenues remained constant, as taxes were constantly adjusted to punish the dwindling population that could pay them.

Greece lost a quarter of a million small enterprises to bankruptcy and half a million workers to overseas job markets. Even behemoths like Viohalko, the country’s biggest industrial group, moved its headquarters abroad to lower their borrowing costs, because markets were factoring in their exposure to Greek taxes as a risk.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, of the New Democracy party, came to power in 2019 pledging to bring back Greece’s lost children and boost entrepreneurship. Zachou’s experience is evidence that the conservatives still have a way to go in taming a bureaucratic and highly politicised state, where incompetence and absentee workers seem tolerated.

Occasionally political parties suffer the consequences. When a passenger train collided with a freight train on February 28, killing 57 mostly young people, Néa Dimokratía was forced to admit that the hapless stationmaster who put it on the wrong track was its own fast-track hire, done outside the usual evaluation process – essentially a party favour.

Most people find it difficult to imagine that the damage done to the economy over many decades of partisan behaviour by conservatives, socialists and left-wingers alike can be unravelled in one government term.

But New Democracy considers that it has at least tried. It came through on promises to lower taxes levied during the years of austerity. Business tax fell from 29 percent to 22 percent. Personal income tax fell from 22 percent to 9 percent. A “solidarity tax”, which added between two and five percentage points to income tax, was abolished as employment rose. Social security contributions fell by three points, and pensions rose for the first time in 12 years, by 8 percent. Minimum wage rose from 580 euros ($627) to 780 euros ($844).

The government says all this was made possible because of good fiscal management that saw it borrowing when interest rates were low. Despite spending 66 billion euros ($71.38bn) on pandemic and energy subsidies, it managed to rebalance the budget last year and is enjoying a three billion euro ($3.2bn) surplus in the first four months of 2023. Greece’s growth last year was 5.5 percent, far above the EU average of 3.5 percent, and it is slated to outperform the bloc this year and next. This growth means that Greece’s burdensome debt has fallen as a percentage of GDP, from a high of 212 percent three years ago, to 169 percent last year.

Such fiscal prudence has earned Greece a rapid credit rating recovery. It expects to return to AAA investment grade status this year.

But there is a sense of déja vu. During the recession, Greeks often said, “The numbers are prospering, but the people are poor”.