He became a known politician after the Catholic Congress of 1896 where he talked about the social objectives of Christian politics as a lecturer with an unusual manner.

Rakovszky signed in the names of his party the pact between the opposition and Prime Minister Kálmán Széll on 23 February 1899.

Rakovszky gave hundreds of speeches in parliament; he regularly took the floor during discussion of the budget year and the house rules.

On 19 February 1906, he stood in for the then ill Speaker of the House of Representatives, Gyula Justh, when the army occupied the diet to dissolve it.

In the course of the diet, he protested against the armed occupation and sent back unopened the two royal dispatches to the king's military commissioner.

During the First World War, he did military service, fought on the Russian and Italian fronts, but he also took part in the House of Representatives' wartime session.

The opposition wanted to place a three-member control commission beside the government, seeing the mistakes that happened in the leading of the foreign affairs and national defenses.

Gyula Andrássy the Younger, Albert Apponyi and István Rakovszky were appointed the so-known control-commission's member.

The moderate opposition espoused his proposal, but Prime Minister István Tisza and the governing party rejected the bill.

It is called peace treaty, which does not promise eternal peace, but eternal unrest, constant agitation, not affectionate cooperation in the interest of achievement of the humanity's great and noble aims, but this suitable to create discord and dislike between the folk and forms new and discords lasting long artificially."

During the plenary session of Autumn 1921, Ibrahim György Kövér tried to kill him; a detachment officer fired at him many times, but missed so Rakovszky survived the assassination attempt.

In June, the legitimists, sensing that the government was taking no real action to bring Charles back, launched a major offensive against Miklós Horthy and Bethlen.

They aimed to undermine Horthy's prestige, weaken his power and create favourable conditions for Charles' return.

In response, Horthy and Bethlen began secret discussions with legitimist leaders in early August, preferring to deal with them rather than with the pro-democracy Smallholder faction of István Szabó de Nagyatád.

For instance, at the end of that month, the Hungarian minister in Paris informed leaders at the French Foreign Ministry that his return was unavoidable due to public opinion.

Although Rakovszky belonged to the moderate wing of the legitimists, he played a deciding role in the preparation of the second coup after the first recurrence experiment together with Baron Antal Lehár, Gusztáv Gratz and Ödön Beniczky.

Rakovszky sketched the internal political conditions of the royal coup on this negotiation, since he would have been the prospective government's leader.

He wanted to avoid the appearance of a military coup, which is why he traveled as a prospective prime minister in front of the king to the western border.