Anti-Socialist Laws
Social democratic policies were first adopted in the German Empire between the 1880s and 1890s, when the conservative Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put in place many social welfare proposals initially suggested by the Social Democrats to hinder their electoral success after he instituted the Anti-Socialist Laws, laying the ground of the first modern welfare state. Those policies were dubbed as State Socialism by the liberal opposition, but the term was later accepted and re-appropriated by Bismarck. It was a set of social programs implemented in Germany that were initiated by Bismarck in 1883 as remedial measures to appease the working class and reduce support for socialism and the Social Democrats following earlier attempts to achieve the same objective through Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. This did not prevent the Social Democrats to become the biggest party in parliament by 1912.