Wilhelm Liebknecht becomes one of the leaders of the SDAP and the leading publisher of the party organ, Der Volksstaat ("the People's State"), the first issue of which is published on October 1 in Leipzig, under the editorship of Liebknecht and Wilhelm Hasenclever (until 1878).

It will henceforth be published three times weekly, and will be the official newspaper of the SPD until the 1990s.

The Socialist Labor party receives more than ten percent of the vote and wins twelve deputies out of three hundred and forty-five in the Reichstag elections of January 10, 1877.

August Bebel is sentenced in June 1877 to nine months of imprisonment (later reduced to six) for insult to Bismarck.

Bebel had been among the group of Socialists following the death of Ferdinand Lassalle that had refused to follow new party leader Jean Baptista von Schweitzer at the Eisenach Conference of 1867, an action which had given rise to the name "Eisenachers" for this Marxist faction.

Together with Wilehelm Liebknecht, he had founded the Sächsische Volkspartei ("Saxon People's Party").

Bebel has also been President of the Union of German Workers' Associations from 1867 and a member of the First International.

He had been elected to the North German Reichstag as a member from Saxony in that same year.

In 1869, he had helped found the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP), which had merged with another organization in 1875 to form the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (SAPD).

An unemployed tinsmith, Emil Max Hödel, tries to assassinate the German Emperor on May 11.

Nine days later, Bismarck introduces in the Reichstag a law for the suppression of socialist meetings, clubs, and publications, but the Reichstag defeats the Bismarck law on May 24 by a vote of 251 to 57.

Another attempt on the life of William I is made on June 7 by a deranged radical, Dr. Karl Eduard Nobiling; the Emperor is gravely wounded.

Bismarck has the Bundesrat dissolve the Reichstag on June 11 and call for new elections.

The Socialist Labor party loses both votes and seats in the new Reichstag elections of July 30, 1878.

Its vote is reduced to 437,158 (from 493,447 in 1877) and its seats from twelve (in 1877) to nine.

The Reichstag passes a “Law Against the Dangerous Efforts of the Social-Democracy” by a vote of 221 to 149 on October 19, outlawing publications, meetings, money collections, etc., by radicals aiming to “over-throw the existing order of state or society.”