I grew up in Slovakia (I faintly remember our split with czechs) and the 90's were really dark: mafia, murders, scams, privatisation, heroin (only in "big" cities), economy going to shit and an attempt of one politician to become basically a dictator (I feel like he was the reason for most of the above) that was thankfully averted by our former president and people coming together against the fucker. From then on it (slowly) got better, no more mafia murders, you rarely see a prostitute and the economy is supposedly doing great (despite our current government). We now have oligarchs and the system is still corrupt, but it's getting better. The young generation is getting really tired of this shit, there are projects involving younger people that expose corruption networks on weekly basis so it's getting a little harder to steal. The good thing is that our press is more or less free or as free as it can be, they still get fined for inappropriate content but it's mostly for hidden ads and stuff like that.

But there is also the other side of the coin, in recent years we saw the rise of media focusing on conspiracy theories and the whole amalgamated conspiracist-spiritual-neofascist wave that doesn't even recognize itself for what it is. We've had elections and the fascists got ~8% thanks to our fucking prime minister who based his campaign around the refugee scare and quotas. For context we only have to take around 500 and we only take christians which we handpick, we're that tolerant. The funny/sad thing about this is that you can hear people talking about how these evil refugees going to take our jobs and force our women to wear burkas. I understand that migrants can be a problem for some countries, but in mine, Czech rep., Poland they are only used as a political tool and the greatest tragedy is that most people are too dumb to see that.

TL;DR: shit is much better now, but we still have more to go