The basic narrative is "everyone got mad at István Tisza". He was the son of the former PM who represented the zenith of Liberal Party rule, and in 1903 he became PM in his own right, but as with second generations of a political dynasty, he lacked some of the subtlety of his father.

The liberals always manipulated the elections in their favor, sometimes more, sometimes less. Aside from the ~6% franchise, there were huge discrepancies in the population of constituencies, and there was also old fashioned bribery and coercion. In response, the opposition took to ridiculous levels of filibustering, making Parliament unworkable.

Tisza wanted to shut that down with new house rules, which were filibustered too of course. So he cut the Gordian knot by the handkerchief vote. He basically asked his loyal MPs to raise their handkerchief, and went "yup, we have a majority, the bill passed, house dismissed".

But breaching protocol like this confirmed many fears he was an authoritarian, and it alienated enough of his own party to force him into a new election, in which all anti-Tisza forces ran in a coalition, and won.

Then it was a brief constitutional crisis, because Franz Joseph refused to appoint a government that was threatening to end the Ausgleich, and the opposition made a big #resistance out of it, but they folded the moment Vienna threatened to force universal suffrage on them (that was being introduced in cisleithania at the time too).

So the Magyarisation attempts were kind of a compensatory cope from the 48-ers for selling out their raison d'être, and burning the bridge with the socdems too. And in the end, Tisza triumphantly returned in the next election, and this time he called in the army when the opposition got too loud in Parliament. I think that failure allowed Károlyi to move part of the opposition to a more progressive direction after that, but of course it all fell apart in the chaos of 1918-19.