Among the many difficult problems which Minister-president Kasimir Felix Badeni's government (1895–97) bequeathed to all the regimes which followed it the most serious arose from the fact that, as a consequence of the confusion caused by his policies, the tradition that the imperial-royal government in Austria had to collaborate with parliament broke down. The filibustering tactics practiced in the representative bodies of the Austrian half of the empire during the brief period of the Badeni ministry, though they were certainly not unprecedented, nevertheless, assumed a proportion and form hitherto unknown. The obstructionists succeeded in destroying the most fundamental principle of parliamentarianism—the idea that the will of the majority must prevail in the legislative body—and in overthrowing the only constitutional system which had existed in Austria since the laws dealing with ministerial responsibility and imperial representation were passed in 1867. Any government selected by the sovereign without formal consideration of the political opinions of the members of parliament in the long run could operate effectively only if a majority of the members of that body at least tolerated it—provided, of course, that the state was not to surrender to a barely concealed absolutism. Apart from the political tensions which a resort to absolutism would have engendered in Austria and the fact that it would have endangered the rather tenuous relations which Austria had with Hungary, paragraphs 10 and 14 of the law on imperial representation were so worded as to create an effective legal barrier against such a hazardous step in the direction of absolutism.1