In 1884 he pleaded eloquently in the House of Magnates for the establishment of civil marriage, and in 1888 was Minister of Education in the Cabinet of Koloman Tisza.
In 1886 Wekerle was elected to the House of Deputies, became in the same year financial secretary of state, and in 1889 succeeded Tisza as minister of finance.
The Pest Basin extends over the greater portion of central and southern Hungary, and is traversed by the Theiss (Tisza) and its numerous tributaries.
Fortunately, in Kalman Tisza, the leader of the Liberal From the first, Tisza was exposed to the violent attacks of the opposition, which embraced, not only the party of Independence, champions of the principles of 1848, but the so-called National party, led by the brilliant orator Count Albert Apponyi, which aimed at much the same ends but looked upon the Compromise of 1867 as a convenient substructure on which to build up the Magyar state.
Neither could forgive Tisza for repudiating his earlier Radical policy, the so-called Bihar Programme (March 6, 1868), which went far beyond the Compromise in the direction of independence, and both attacked him with a violence which his unyielding temper, and the ruthless methods by which he always knew how to secure victory, tended ever to fan into fury.