He became the leader of the Young Czech Party in Austria-Hungary and later of the National Democratic Party in Czechoslovakia. In 1896, Kramář become the Austrian Minister of Finance. Like other Slavic politicians in the Dual Monarchy, Kramář disliked the Compromise of 1867 that he felt had elevated the Magyars to a position of political power that their numbers did not warrant and wanted the Austrian Empire to abandon its alliance with Germany in favor of an alliance with Russia. Kramář believed that with time and democracy in the form of universal suffrage would transform the Austrian Empire into a Slavic state as the Slavic peoples were the most numerous of the various ethnic groups in the empire.