Being free to vote doesn't make you feel free and secure.
It's not even safe to attend to a protest to ask for a ceasefire in Gaza. So yeah, you can say "I hate Merz", but don't even try to say "Free Palestine"...
Free Palestine. There, I said it. Although I think it's a rather dumb slogan, and doesn't even remotely do the situation justice.
Seriously though, the notion that free speech is impaired in Germany is completely ridiculous and just a massive hoax. Compare this with the situation in the USA where the same people - like Vance who brazenly attacked Germany for an alleged lack of free speech - were super quick to demand a cancellation of Kimmel, because "you can't say that!"
We have laws against hate speech, and they may not be perfect, but they have a reason - we simply don't want to tolerate something like the Nazis shouting "burn the jews" in the name of free speech. Calling for violence does not have to be protected by speaking your mind. That's completely silly.
But the idea that Germany is anything but a completely free country is ridiculous. Some of the shit that people say (AfD, BSW) drives me nuts, but well, it's a free country.
But its never just 'free palestine' or 'stop the war', is it. Its always mixed with 'from river to the sea', mixed with calls for hatred towards jews, sometimes even jewish genocide.
Extremists doing what extremists can, which is being extreme as a default. Don't expect much support from public, and greta's gradual slide to political extremism isn't helping much, most people are fed up with her and her persona just poisons topics with... extremism.
Germany’s constitution (the Basic Law) does protect freedom of opinion and expression, but it explicitly allows restrictions via “general laws” to protect personal honor, youth, and human dignity.
Recent enforcement shows how this plays out: police raids have targeted individuals posting “hate speech” or “extremist” content online. What constitutes hate speech or extremist content is “conveniently” interpreted at times.
The OP claimed that people's homes got raided for "daring to insult the ruling class", your source claims that people's homes got raided for posting extremist racist speech online. Unless you believe in some ridiculous conspiracy where ZE JEWS CONTROL ZE BANKS, this has absolutely no relation to your ability to insult the ruling class: Black people and Muslims are not "the ruling class".
And if you do believe in such a conspiracy, please post your personal information such that I can forward it to the relevant agencies and have your house raided. Because we have been through that shit in this country and have no desire to ever see it again.
Propaganda is painting this as something different than it is.
Here we consider speech for what it is: something you can express freely, within the limits of civil society. If you pass those limits, then you incur in problems.
Germany let someone speak freely a tad too much in the twenties and thirties, and they don't want to make that mistake again.
I understand the point of "absolute free speech", and I would subscribe to it if it wasn't that groups like AfD, or Trump's flavor of conservatism, hide behind it to achieve their authoritarian goals. To avoid that authoritarian result, you have to police certain types of speech like Germany does.
I say it again, it's nasty and needs a very strong set of counterbalances, which Germany - unlike the US - still has. Therefore this remains a much more freer country than Say-whatever-you-like-on-Rogan America. Freedom for us is free healthcare, a welfare state, an ethics-based concept of societal rights and obligations.
We don't market ourselves as the beacon of free speech and FREEDOM by making both empty words fueled by extreme individualism. We still believe in Solidarität and on social-oriented policies, both on the right and left side of the isle. We have ferocious political battles about topics that are too violently policed, by the way, like right now about Palestine and Israel, and people take to the streets FREELY, despite some despicable police brutality episodes. We do have the contradictions and complexities of any modern western society.
Yet we don't have too many runaway billionaires that are more powerful than governments, and we are still ALL a bit better off because of that.
It's boring, but it works.
AfD is against all this, and it is because it's provenly funded by Russia and other enemies of the west. They appeal to the Volk, but in reality are infested by double-standards, hate, and a specific type of political individualism and authoritarian views that need to be stopped with all legal and societally-acceptable means possible.
But I guess you can’t guard against something you either do not have the capacity to or do not wish to see.