As I recall, the system was set up with 3 branches of government in tension. Obviously, that was naive.
The system was fine but no one has yet constructed a system that can withstand weaponized mass stupidity. Even the ones created to combat corruption fail to account for this danger.
So.
Democracies by default assumed that all players in the system are supportive of the system itself, kind of like all early Internet protocols assumed that there are no malicious users.
Germany tried to solve that problem by creating an extra-governmental body tasked with public broadcasting, with budget autonomy (collects its own pseudo tax) and supposed political independence.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Öffentlich-rechtlicher_Rundf...
But this falls short too. There are many positions occupied by people with political party affiliation and cases of corruption/embezzlement.
And the cherry on top are the austerity hawks chipping away at the school system for many decades now. The german school system is slowly collapsing, with state represantatives even boykotting a federal conference because their problems had been ignored for so long.
https://taz.de/Laender-boykottieren-den-Bildungsgipfel/!5918...
Limiting freedom of speech can be helpful in delicate, small scale cases but becomes unenforcable when the dipshit echo chambers grow and the overton window moves.
Germany has the same route ahead as the USA. I am certain :(