The outgoing prime minister vowed to focus instead on reorganizing the patriotic movement following his landslide election defeat

Hungary's outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orban said he will not take his seat in the new parliament after Fidesz's election defeat, announcing instead that he will focus on reorganizing what he called the country's "patriotic movement."

Orban said in a video statement on Saturday that the parliamentary mandate he won as head of the Fidesz-KDNP list "is in fact the parliamentary mandate of Fidesz," and that he had therefore decided to "give it back."

"I am now needed not in parliament, but in the reorganization of the patriotic movement," he said.

The move comes less than two weeks after Orban's long-dominant Fidesz party was crushed by Peter Magyar's Tisza party, which won 141 of the 199 seats in Hungary's April 12 parliamentary election.

Orban said Fidesz's parliamentary faction would be "radically transformed" and that Gergely Gulyas would lead the new group when it forms on Monday. He also said the party would hold a national assembly next week and bring forward its "renewal congress" to June.

Despite stepping away from parliament, Orban made clear he intends to remain at the top of the party, saying the leadership had proposed that he continue as Fidesz president and that he was ready to do so if the congress renewed its confidence in him.

Orban struck a tone of defiance rather than retreat, telling supporters that "this camp has remained Hungary's most united and cohesive political community."

The election loss marked the sharpest reversal of Orban's career and is expected to reshape Hungary's relations with Brussels and the US, as well as Kiev and Moscow.

Orban had frozen the disbursement of Ukrainian funding in retaliation for the halting of oil supplies via the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline in January. He called it a politically motivated ploy aimed at supporting Magyar's party.

Just weeks after the election, Kiev restarted the flow of Russian oil through the supposedly damaged pipeline. Budapest swiftly lifted its veto, and the European Union formally approved €90 billion ($105 billion) in emergency funding for Ukraine for 2026-2027 and adopted its 20th package of sanctions against Russia earlier this week.

(RT.com)