Count Kasimir Felix Badeni

In 1896 he succeeded in implementing a form of universal male suffrage but made it palatable to the ruling interests of the Empire. To the previous four classes of voters, which depended on the amount of taxes each individual paid, his reform added a fifth class to include every adult male below the five-guilder threshold set for the fourth class in the 1882 Taaffe reform.

The electoral reform had far-reaching effects: the newly established fifth class encompassed 72 of the 425 seats in the lower house of the Imperial Council (Reichsrat) and most mandates went to the Social Democrats, the populist Christian Social Party, and also to German nationalists. In a short time, the Imperial Council developed from an Assembly of Notables to a gathering of definitive parliamentary groups with a strong party discipline.

Count Badeni the "curious gentleman", revives the invention of the cat organ and thus achieves a great success. Caricature published in Kladderadatsch (1897)

Badeni courted controversy when, in an attempt to gain the support of the Young Czech faction in the Reichsrat, he addressed the language issue in Bohemia.[2] His ordinance of 5 April 1897 declared "that Czech and German should be the languages of the 'inner service' throughout Bohemia." This meant that civil servants in the province would have to know both Czech and German, since government business would be conducted in both languages for internal Bohemian affairs. Germans in Bohemia were outraged, since this effectively excluded the majority of them from government jobs; Czechs learned German in school, but Germans had usually little to no knowledge of the Czech language.

Late-19th-century Germans in Austria-Hungary, as a general rule, wanted the Empire to maintain its German character established during the period of Germanization under Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor in the late 18th century, so they resisted the demands of the other ethnic groups for linguistic recognition. Badeni's ordinance was seen by Germans as the "last straw" in a series of concessions. Badeni was not prepared for the level of animosity the Germans in Bohemia and elsewhere in the Empire directed at him due to his reform.

The fringe German Nationalist Party, headed by Georg Schönerer, hoping to destabilize the Empire and join the German lands of Austria to the new German Empire, disrupted parliamentary proceedings and instigated violent protests. Although most Germans of Austria had no sympathy for the Nationalist Party's cause, they participated in street protests across the Austro-Hungarian Empire, hoping to have the ordinance repealed. Obstructionism by German nationalists slowed or stopped parliamentary business in the Reichsrat and riots erupted in Vienna, Graz, Salzburg, and the Alpine provinces.[2] Riots took place also in Prague and martial law was put into effect there.

Amidst this political turmoil, in November 1897, Emperor Franz Joseph, frightened by the mass agitation of some of the most important segments of society, dismissed Badeni. His fall, however, did not end the political and ethnic problems within the Empire and for several years, while the Reichsrat met occasionally, the government ruled largely through emergency decree. Badeni's language ordinances were repealed in 1899, disappointing Czechs and failing to appease German nationalists.[2]

Some commentators of the time felt, that Badeni was unaccustomed to the political dynamics of the more-industrialized western part of the Empire; he was used to the provincial social relations of Galicia, where he was a landowner. That was given as an explanation for Badeni's political blunder. In fact Badeni believed that the Czechs were growing as a nation and their national ambitions would sooner or later have to be accommodated within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as the ambitions of the Hungarians had been decades previously. Badeni was one of the few politicians who saw that without rapprochement between different nations within the Austro-Hungarian state, the Empire would fall apart.