Born as the son of a post official in Krems, in the Cisleithanian crown land of Lower Austria, Miklas graduated from high school at Seitenstetten and went on to study history and geography at the University of Vienna.

A rare opponent of German nationalism, he declared himself against a closer connection with the Weimar Republic and played a pivotal role in adopting the red-white-red Austrian flag.

[3] Miklas did not intervene, when on 4 March 1933 after a heated discussion in the Nationalrat parliament over a strike of federal railways employees Speaker Karl Renner as well as his deputies Rudolf Ramek and Sepp Straffner resigned their offices.

The assembly was no longer capable for actions and decisions, which gave Miklas' party fellow Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss the pretext to declare the parliament's "self-elimination".

The government obstructed any resumption of the session by massive presence of police forces as well as of paramilitary Heimwehr troops led by Emil Fey, a self-coup that enabled Dollfuss to rule by "emergency decrees" following the Article 48 example set by German President Paul von Hindenburg.

Miklas was highly unpopular among Austrian Nazis, as he refused to commute the death sentences imposed on assassins of Dollfuss after the failed July Putsch in 1934.

After Schuschnigg on 12 February 1938 had been summoned to the Berghof by Adolf Hitler to receive German demands, Miklas offered amnesty to the jailed Nazi members but initially refused to turn over the national police force to their leader Arthur Seyss-Inquart.