You can express your opinion about everything and everybody, including politicians, in public as much as you want in germany. But first paragraph in the german constitution is about human dignity ("Menschenwürde"), not freedom of speech. Which means, that when you insult somebody in public, it can happen that the affected person might sue you, and that a court might judge that you hurt the person's dignity. The consequence might be, that you have to pay a fee.

Recently there were cases of police operations at the homes of people who where accused of insulting a politician. Those operations where heavily criticized in the german public and followed by a court rouling, that judged that the police overreacted in those cases.

Somehow, in certain circles, this whole story gets shortened to "If you criticize the government in germany, your home gets raided by the police".

If you insist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bMzFDpfDwc It was pretty heavily debated on r/DE. https://www.reddit.com/r/de/comments/1is8a7l/germany_is_pros...

Please tell me how you think this "protect one's honor" law doesn't get abused.

Also, an youtuber from my country made a video during the pandemic exposing the mistreatment of seasonal fruit picking workers from my country working in Germany, and the video got blocked in Germany by Youtube, most likely on request by flagging.

So do do you expect to learn about censorship of German media if you follow German media which is subject to censorship? Do you realize the irony of it all? Did you ever expect for German media to go out and say "here's how we're censoring you"? Germans are living in Plato's cave allegory and are irate when people call them out for it.