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.

Keep calm and continue. We will renew and protect our patriotic community.