标签： Europe

PRISTINA, Kosovo — The small Balkan country of Kosovo is set to become the latest contributor to a new U.S.-backed international stabilization mission in Gaza, a step national leaders frame as a historic turning point: after relying on NATO-led peacekeeping for its own security for nearly 25 years, Kosovo is now stepping forward to provide security to a conflict zone abroad.

Kosovo’s parliament is scheduled to vote Friday to formally approve the government’s earlier decision to deploy a contingent of several dozen security personnel to the International Stabilization Force (ISF), a multinational mission established following last year’s ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. The force, which will support peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in Gaza under the Trump administration’s Board of Peace initiative, counts Kosovo among its participating members, alongside other nations including Indonesia, Albania, and Kazakhstan, which have already pledged contributions.

For Kosovo, the deployment carries far more symbolic weight than its small troop size suggests. The country has viewed the contribution as tangible proof of its progress and growing international standing since it declared independence from Serbia in 2008 — a sovereignty declaration that Belgrade still refuses to recognize.

The modern context of Kosovo’s security journey traces back to the 1998-1999 conflict between Serbian forces and Kosovo separatist fighters. When Belgrade launched a brutal crackdown on separatist movements, NATO launched a military intervention in 1999 that ousted Serbian troops from Kosovo territory, clearing the way for the deployment of the alliance’s KFOR peacekeeping mission. Ever since, NATO member states have shouldered the responsibility of maintaining Kosovo’s security, a reality that has shaped the country’s perspective on international peacebuilding.

“Our country has been a security consumer, meaning NATO countries have contributed to the security of the Republic of Kosovo,” Defense Minister Ejup Maqedonci told the Associated Press in an interview. “Today we are entering a phase where we are becoming a provider, or exporter, of security.”

Maqedonci detailed that the Kosovo contingent will include personnel from the country’s demining units along with other specialist officers. Once deployed, the troops will carry out a range of duties aligned with the ISF mandate: delivering humanitarian aid to civilian populations, providing local security support, and other tasks as assigned by mission leadership. The minister added that preparations for deployment are in their final stages, with a U.S. diplomatic representative assisting with critical logistical arrangements, including troop vaccinations, visa processing, and other administrative requirements.

Currently, Kosovo’s domestic security force numbers approximately 4,000 personnel. The force is currently undergoing training and restructuring to evolve into a small, professional military aligned with NATO integration goals.

Public reaction to the deployment decision has been largely supportive among Kosovar citizens. Milot Hoxha, a 43-year-old musician from Pristina, voiced strong backing for the mission, noting that Kosovo’s own post-conflict experience gives the country unique perspective on the value of international support. “We ourselves have gone through such a transition and every small help for us has been very significant,” Hoxha said. “I believe it will be the same for them, that any kind of help will be positive. I strongly support this decision.”

Despite the milestone for Kosovo’s international engagement, cross-border tensions with Serbia remain unresolved. Friction between Belgrade and Pristina has simmered constantly since the 1999 war, with occasional outbreaks of violent confrontation. The European Union has led long-running mediation efforts to normalize relations between the two sides, but those negotiations have stalled in recent months.

Global recognition of Kosovo’s independence remains split: the United States and a majority of European Union member states recognize Kosovo as a sovereign state, while Russia and China continue to back Serbia’s territorial claim to the region.

Just days after Hungarian voters delivered a sharp rebuke to Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian far-right agenda, Bulgaria is gearing up for another early national election that could propel a well-known left-leaning former head of state into the prime minister’s office.

Years of unbroken political instability have gripped this EU and NATO member state of 6.5 million people, and this April 19 snap vote marks the eighth early election the country has held in just five years. The crisis stretches back to 2021, when long-serving conservative Prime Minister Boyko Borissov stepped down after mass public protests over systemic corruption and pervasive inequality. Since that turning point, no sitting administration has managed to hold power for longer than 12 months, falling to either mass street demonstrations or parliamentary backroom maneuvers. This constant rotation has eroded public trust in state institutions, driven widespread voter apathy, and pushed election turnout down to historic lows in recent cycles.

The frontrunner in this latest vote is 62-year-old Rumen Radev, a former fighter pilot and air force commander who stepped down from his largely ceremonial post as president in January, cutting his second five-year term short to launch a bid for the prime ministership. One of Bulgaria’s most popular public figures, Radev leads the center-left Progressive Bulgaria coalition, and has campaigned on a promise of sweeping change to end the country’s ongoing political paralysis. His platform centers on rooting out the oligarchic corruption that has plagued Bulgarian public life for decades, a message that has resonated deeply with voters frustrated by years of graft and institutional failure. Mass anti-corruption protests that drew hundreds of thousands of mostly young demonstrators to the streets late last year forced the collapse of the previous conservative-led government, clearing the way for this new snap vote.

Bulgaria has made major European integration strides in recent years: it joined the border-free Schengen Area in 2024, and adopted the euro as its official currency on January 1 this year. But the country has also faced growing concerns over Russian interference in its domestic politics. Last month, Sofia formally requested assistance from the EU’s diplomatic service to counter coordinated Russian efforts to shape Bulgarian public opinion through social media disinformation campaigns and pro-Kremlin propaganda outlets. Experts have warned that active networks of covert Russian influence accounts are working to sow political division within the country ahead of the vote.

Unlike previous low-turnout contests, pre-election polling projects that turnout this Sunday will rise above 50%, up from an average of just 35% in recent elections. Analysts attribute the expected increase to the high-profile candidacy of Radev, as well as new confidence-building measures from the interim government, which has carried out nationwide police raids, made multiple arrests, and launched pretrial proceedings targeting widespread vote-buying.

Most opinion polls, which carry a margin of error between 3 and 3.5 percentage points, show Radev’s coalition capturing more than 30% of the vote, putting it roughly 10 percentage points ahead of its closest competitor: Borissov’s center-right GERB party, the same conservative bloc that was ousted from power in December’s protests. While Radev is widely projected to win a plurality of votes, he will need to form a coalition government to rule, and he has already ruled out working with both GERB and the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, whose leader Delyan Peevksi has been sanctioned for corruption by both the United States and United Kingdom.

The most likely potential coalition partner is the pro-Western bloc “We Continue the Change”, which polls forecast will take third place with 12% to 14% of the vote. However, deep disagreements over foreign policy threaten to derail any potential partnership. While Radev has officially condemned Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he has repeatedly opposed sending military aid to Kyiv and has publicly called for reopening diplomatic negotiations with Russia to end the conflict, aligning with the Eurosceptic and pro-Russian positions that have drawn support from a segment of the Bulgarian electorate.

Even with these leanings, some political analysts argue that Radev is unlikely to attempt a major foreign policy reorientation toward Moscow. Evelina Slavkova, a researcher with Bulgaria’s Trend polling center, noted that the country’s existing institutional ties to the EU and NATO — reinforced by its recent accession to the eurozone and Schengen Area — create strong structural guardrails that keep Bulgaria anchored to Western institutions.

“Our country has succeeded, despite all the obstacles, despite disagreements among some politicians, in building a very important set of tools that keeps Bulgaria on the right track,” Slavkova told the Associated Press. “These memberships allow us to be much more at ease” with our current Western alignment, she added.

Slavkova also pointed out that Radev has deliberately avoided taking clear, definitive stances on divisive issues during the campaign, attempting to straddle competing political positions to broaden his appeal. While that strategic ambiguity may work well on the campaign trail, she noted, governing the country will eventually require Radev to offer clear, uncompromising answers to the pressing challenges facing Bulgaria.

Even before Hungary’s newly elected administration takes office, European Union officials have launched urgent preliminary negotiations with the transition team of election winner Péter Magyar in Budapest, aiming to resolve two critical bloc priorities: unlocking €17 billion ($20 billion) in frozen Hungarian aid and moving forward on a massive long-term loan package for Ukraine. The talks, scheduled for Friday, mark an accelerated push to build cooperation with the incoming government after 16 years of Euroskeptic rule under outgoing Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

European Commission spokesperson Paula Pinho confirmed the urgency of the discussions from Brussels on Thursday, noting that time is running out for several high-stakes policy files. By holding pre-inauguration talks, Pinho explained, the bloc intends to avoid unnecessary delays, ensuring that immediate action can be taken as soon as Magyar’s government is sworn in next month. “The clock is ticking for a number of topics,” Pinho said, adding that preliminary talks would clear the way for swift action “if appropriate” once the new government takes power.

The billions in funding were frozen by the EU in 2022 over widespread concerns about systemic corruption and democratic backsliding during Orbán’s populist administration. For years, the European Commission accused Orbán’s government of eroding judicial independence, cracking down on independent media and academia, violating minority rights, and undermining the rule of law — all charges Orbán rejected as illegitimate interference in Hungary’s national sovereignty. Now, both the EU and Hungary’s incoming leadership have made unlocking the funds a top priority, as the injection of capital is widely seen as critical to stabilizing Hungary’s struggling economy.

The €17 billion is split into two portions: €10 billion in COVID-19 economic recovery funds and €6.3 billion in EU cohesion funding allocated to support underperforming regional economies across the bloc. Negotiators are prioritizing unlocking the recovery funds first, as they face an August expiration deadline, after which the money will be permanently lost to Hungary. Around €10.2 billion of the originally frozen total was approved for release last year after partial reforms under Orbán, leaving the current €17 billion still held in Brussels.

Speaking on social platform X earlier this week, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen — who was repeatedly targeted with harsh criticism by Orbán during the recent election campaign — laid out three clear conditions for unlocking the funds: restoring the rule of law, realigning Hungarian policy with shared EU values, and implementing structural reforms to unlock access to European investment. Magyar’s party Tisza secured a parliamentary supermajority in the April 12 landslide election, giving the incoming government the legislative power to pass deep, rapid reforms to meet these conditions.

Magyar has already publicly committed to making judicial independence, academic freedom, press freedom, and anti-corruption overhauls his administration’s top policy priorities to unlock the funding. In his first post-election press conference Monday, Magyar emphasized that Hungary faces severe financial distress, and his government’s core mission is to secure the funds that rightfully belong to the country. He also made a key commitment to EU leaders: unlike his predecessor, he will honor the December 2024 agreement to provide Ukraine with a €90 billion macroeconomic stabilization loan, a deal Orbán unexpectedly vetoed after initially signaling support, sparking outrage across the 27-nation bloc.

Policy analysts say the incoming government faces few technical barriers to unlocking the funds quickly, thanks to its legislative supermajority. Zsolt Darvas, a senior fellow at Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, noted that all required legislative changes can be completed in a single day if Tisza moves forward with its reform agenda. The core changes required are adjustments to judicial selection processes and judicial powers, changes that Darvas described as technically straightforward and easy to implement.

To meet the August expiration deadline for COVID recovery funds, Darvas added that Magyar can follow a precedent set by Poland and Portugal, where unused funds were parked in national development banks for future disbursement if final reforms are not completed by the cutoff. Still, Hungary has already incurred significant costs from the two-year funding freeze: Darvas estimates that roughly €2 billion of the originally allocated €16 billion has already been permanently lost. On top of that, Hungary has paid €1 million in daily fines since June 13, 2024, plus a one-time €200 million penalty, over Orbán’s refusal to align Hungary’s asylum policies with EU standards. Darvas noted that Hungary could also end these fines by following Poland’s example, maintaining restrictive migration policies while still complying with basic EU legal requirements.

While unlocking the frozen funds will not solve Hungary’s long-running economic crisis on its own, Darvas explained that complying with EU regulations will send a critical signal to international investors that Hungary is once again a stable, predictable destination for foreign capital. Beyond the frozen funds, Hungary could also access an additional €16 billion in low-interest loans through the EU’s new €150 billion Security Action for Europe (SAFE) initiative, a program designed to boost European defense industrial capacity as the United States reduces its security commitments to the continent. According to analysis from Jeremy Cliffe of the European Council on Foreign Relations, the combination of frozen funds and SAFE loans would total roughly 15% of Hungary’s annual GDP. Eighteen of the EU’s 27 member states have already accessed SAFE funding, and Hungary is eligible to join the program immediately once it aligns with EU defense policy priorities.

BARCELONA, Spain – Brazil’s progressive President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva touched down in Barcelona Friday for a high-profile two-day official visit, kicking off a series of multilateral gatherings that bring together like-minded leaders of small and mid-sized nations united by shared concerns over eroding democratic norms and the expanding influence of far-right populism across the globe.

Lula and his Spanish counterpart Pedro Sánchez, both widely recognized as leading standard-bearers of progressive politics across their respective continents, have positioned themselves as vocal critics of the policies and agenda of U.S. President Donald Trump, who has previously imposed and threatened additional punitive tariffs on both of their economies. For years, reactionary political factions and far-right populist movements have gained steady traction across the Americas and Europe, creating a urgent push for coordinated action from centrist and left-leaning democratic leaders.

The visit opens with a bilateral meeting between Lula, Sánchez and their full cabinet delegations at Barcelona’s historic former royal palace, where the two heads of state are set to sign a series of new bilateral agreements covering economic cooperation, technological innovation and joint social policy initiatives. These one-on-one talks will serve as a precursor to two major multilateral summits scheduled for Saturday, held at Barcelona’s sprawling central conference center, which will draw political leaders from every populated continent.

The first of Saturday’s gatherings is the fourth edition of the Meeting in Defense of Democracy, a forum first launched by Brazil and Spain in 2024 to facilitate cross-border collaboration against what organizers frame as three core threats to participatory democracy: rising extremism, deepening political polarization, and rampant misinformation. Previous iterations of the summit have been hosted at United Nations headquarters in New York and in Santiago, Chile, in 2024.

Despite both leaders’ public opposition to many of Trump’s policy choices – including his joint military strike against Iran alongside Israel – Lula pushed back against framing the summit as an explicit anti-Trump rally. Speaking in an interview with Spanish national newspaper El País Thursday, Lula clarified: “This is not going to be an anti-Trump meeting. We are going to discuss the state of democracy, to see what went wrong and what we have to do to repair it.”

This year’s summit will boast an impressive lineup of attending heads of state and senior leaders, including European Council President Antonio Costa, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Colombian President Gustavo Petro, alongside leaders from smaller nations ranging from Uruguay and Lithuania to Ghana and Albania.

Sheinbaum’s presence at the gathering comes on the heels of a breakthrough in a long-running diplomatic dispute between Madrid and Mexico City, when Spain’s King Felipe VI recently acknowledged that the Spanish conquest of the Americas resulted in widespread abuse against Indigenous peoples, clearing a path for normalized high-level engagement. Sheinbaum, who has emerged as one of the most influential progressive voices in Latin America amid the region’s recent rightward political shift and mounting pressure from the Trump administration, maintains high approval ratings at home and has struck a careful diplomatic balance: preserving functional ties with Washington while firmly pushing back on Trump’s policies that threaten regional sovereignty.

Following the close of the democracy summit, most attending leaders will remain in Barcelona for the inaugural Global Progressive Mobilization, a new gathering of left-leaning politicians and policy experts hosted at the same venue later Saturday. The initiative grew out of a 2024 conversation between Sánchez and former Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, now president of the Party of European Socialists, during a meeting of European socialist leaders.

Both Lula and Sánchez are set to deliver keynote addresses at the mobilization, which is expected to draw 3,000 total attendees including U.S. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy. The event will feature a full schedule of roundtable discussions covering a wide range of progressive priorities, from addressing global wage inequality to developing new strategies to improve progressive electoral performance at the national level.

The summits cap a busy stretch of international diplomacy for Sánchez, who recently returned from a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping – his fourth trip to Beijing in just over three years. In a striking break with Washington, Sánchez’s center-left government has already closed Spanish airspace to U.S. military aircraft deployed for operations in the Iran war, and has refused to allow the U.S. access to jointly operated military bases in southern Spain for any activities related to the conflict. Earlier this week, Lula also released a public video message expressing “deep solidarity” with Pope Leo XIV, after Trump launched a series of public criticisms of the pontiff following the Pope’s public condemnation of the Iran war.

Pol Morillas, director of Barcelona-based foreign affairs think tank CIDOB, notes that the dual summits represent a deliberate show of force by mainstream democratic leaders, who have watched far-right populist groups successfully leverage international gatherings to spread their core messages of anti-immigration policy and economic nationalism. Morillas frames the gatherings as aligned with the core argument of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s widely discussed January speech at the Davos World Economic Forum, which called on global “middle powers” to develop new collective strategies to navigate an increasingly fragmented world dominated by confrontational superpowers.

Morillas told the Associated Press that Lula, Sánchez and the other participating leaders “share the understanding that the world is not just for the great powers.” The event reflects a growing push among mid-sized and smaller democratic nations to carve out a collective, independent voice on global issues ranging from democratic governance to conflict resolution. AP correspondents Megan Janetsky in Mexico City and Mauricio Savarese in Sao Paulo, Brazil contributed reporting to this article.

Against a backdrop of unprecedented global volatility, the United Kingdom has laid out a clear strategy to deepen practical cooperation with its European neighbors, guided by what the country’s EU Relations Minister Nick Thomas-Symonds calls an “ambitious and ruthlessly pragmatic” approach focused squarely on advancing UK national interests. Speaking exclusively to the BBC from the British ambassador’s Brussels residence, Thomas-Symonds framed the shift toward warmer UK-EU relations as a direct response to growing global instability, arguing that British voters have grown increasingly receptive to closer cross-channel collaboration amid mounting global threats. “We find ourselves in a dangerous situation in the world, and there is a particular imperative for closer ties right now, I find broad public support for this direction,” he noted.

Today’s geopolitical landscape paints a stark picture of the pressures driving this policy shift: Europe is entering its fifth year of the largest continental conflict since World War II in Ukraine, global energy markets are roiled by rising fuel prices and spillover tensions from tensions around the Strait of Hormuz, and the global economy remains under sustained strain. Meanwhile, longstanding diplomatic ties between the UK and its traditional closest ally, the United States, have deteriorated sharply in recent months, creating new incentives for London to align more closely with Brussels.

The push for deeper cooperation is already visible in the security and defence space, where the UK has taken a leading role in coordinating a unified European response to the war in Ukraine. Following a commitment from European leaders to increase the continent’s own defence capacity to Washington, London and Brussels are also moving forward with plans for joint arms procurement.

Beyond defence, the administration of Prime Minister Keir Starmer has prioritized unwinding the thick layers of post-Brexit red tape that have raised costs for UK businesses trading with the EU – the UK’s largest export market, nearly a decade after the original Brexit referendum. By the time of the second post-Brexit UK-EU summit scheduled for this summer (a final date has not yet been set), the UK government expects to conclude three key new agreements: a food and agricultural safety pact that will cut bureaucratic burdens for exporters shipping products such as meat to Northern Ireland and the EU bloc, a mutual carbon emissions trading arrangement, and a youth mobility program that allows British and European young people to study and work in each other’s territories for limited periods. This week, the two sides also formally confirmed the UK will rejoin the EU’s iconic Erasmus+ education exchange scheme, expanding study abroad opportunities for British youth across the bloc.

The Starmer government has been careful to stress that all new cooperation agreements respect the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum and the party’s manifesto red lines: the UK will not seek re-entry to the EU, its single market, or its customs union. This position has failed to satisfy critics on both sides of the Brexit divide, however.

Opponents of closer alignment, including the leadership of the Conservative Party and Reform UK, argue that any deeper cooperation requires the UK to adopt EU regulations without having a seat at the table when rules are written, turning Britain into a “rule-taker” rather than a rule-maker – directly contradicting the 2016 Leave campaign’s core promise to “take back control” from Brussels. Former UKIP leader Nigel Farage has gone as far as to label planned upcoming legislation to create a fast-track process for aligning UK regulation with future EU standards a “backdoor attempt to drag Britain back under EU control.” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has similarly accused the government of lacking transparency, arguing that if ministers want to rejoin the EU, they should state that goal openly.

On the other side of the debate, opposition parties including the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party argue that the government’s incremental approach does not go far enough to deliver the economic benefits of closer alignment that the UK desperately needs. Political analysts have summed up the government’s position as a awkward balancing act: caught between the economic imperatives of reducing trade barriers with the EU and the political constraints imposed by the narrow 2016 Brexit result and ongoing division over the issue.

All incremental cooperation agreements also come with a direct financial cost for British taxpayers, a reality the government has not shied away from. Rejoining Erasmus+ will cost UK taxpayers £570 million in its first year alone, while the UK’s participation in the EU’s Horizon science research program – agreed under the previous Conservative administration – costs £2.2 billion annually. Supporters of the arrangement note that two years after rejoining Horizon, the UK has become one of the program’s top beneficiaries, securing a disproportionate share of research grants and collaborative opportunities.

Thomas-Symonds has repeatedly emphasized that all cooperation will be strictly limited to areas that deliver clear net benefits to the UK, with no compromise on national interests. For example, he said the UK plans to pursue an independent regulatory path for artificial intelligence that diverges from Brussels’ approach, and has so far declined to join the EU’s SAFE defence loans scheme because the €2 billion (£1.7 billion) membership fee demanded by Brussels – roughly 10% of the UK’s entire annual defence budget – remains too high.

EU officials have made clear that the closer the UK seeks to get to the EU single market, the more it will be required to align with EU rules and accept core EU principles – a reality that creates ongoing friction. French MEP Nathalie Loiseau, a close ally of President Emmanuel Macron, confirmed that the EU’s core terms have not changed since the 2016 Brexit vote: the deeper the integration, the higher the requirement for regulatory alignment. In the most extreme scenario of near-single market access, the EU could demand the UK reinstate freedom of movement – a longstanding red line for the current UK government.

The ongoing negotiations over UK access to the EU’s internal electricity market highlight this tension. Thomas-Symonds describes energy market integration as a top national priority for the UK, a lesson learned after the dramatic energy price spikes following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine and recent market volatility caused by tanker disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. Even so, Brussels has demanded that the UK contribute to the EU’s Cohesion Fund, a pot of money designed to support economic development in poorer EU regions, as a condition of accessing the electricity market. When asked if the UK would accept this demand, Thomas-Symonds brushed it off as merely the EU’s opening negotiating position, declining to elaborate further.

Another persistent criticism of the government’s current approach is its heavy focus on agreements for trade in goods, which critics argue will not deliver the widespread economic gains Chancellor Rachel Reeves has promised, given that the UK’s economy is overwhelmingly focused on services. The government pushes back on this, projecting that the new food safety and carbon trading agreements alone will add £9 billion to the UK economy by 2040 – a timeline that critics note is decades away.

The European Commission, the EU’s executive body that handles trade negotiations on behalf of member states, has also faced criticism from within the bloc. Several EU member states that maintain close trade and political ties with London have complained off the record that the commission is being unnecessarily rigid in its negotiations, and should show more flexibility to strike bespoke deals with the UK – especially given the shared security and economic threats the bloc faces from Russia, China, and increasingly, the United States, according to senior EU diplomats who spoke to the BBC.

When asked if the push for closer UK-EU ties amounted to an admission that the UK’s long-cherished “special relationship” with the United States was over, amid repeated public criticism of Starmer from US President Donald Trump over the UK’s refusal to join Washington’s conflict with Iran, Thomas-Symonds rejected the framing. “The special relationship is deep and enduring,” he said, adding that the UK does not have to choose between its European and transatlantic allies. Even so, the question remains: as the UK increasingly aligns its regulations with the EU across multiple sectors, it will become progressively more difficult to deliver on the core Brexit promise of striking independent free trade deals with third countries including the United States. Tensions have already flared: last May, Trump and Starmer agreed to a limited bilateral trade deal that modestly expanded agricultural access and cut punitive US tariffs on British car exports, but left broader 10% US tariffs on most British exports in place. This week, Trump even threatened to scrap even that limited deal entirely in retaliation for the UK’s refusal to back his Iran policy.

As negotiations progress, the UK government’s balancing act between domestic political constraints, economic imperatives, and shifting global alliances will only grow more challenging, with the outcome set to reshape Britain’s place in the world for decades to come.

BUDAPEST, Hungary – Four days after a historic electoral earthquake brought an abrupt end to Viktor Orbán’s 16 consecutive years as Hungary’s prime minister, the long-serving populist nationalist leader announced Thursday that his ruling Fidesz party must undergo a complete organizational and ideological renewal to remain a relevant force in Hungarian politics. The landslide defeat handed a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority to Orbán’s center-right challenger, the Tisza party, led by former Orbán ally Péter Magyar, who has already begun moving quickly to form a new government.

The scale of Fidesz’s loss triggered immediate widespread speculation that Orbán, who has served as Fidesz’s party president almost continuously since the early 1990s, would step down from his leadership post. But in an exclusive interview with a pro-Orbán YouTube channel, Orbán made clear he has no intention of exiting the political stage, saying he is already working to rebuild the party from the ground up.

“This is not a matter of swapping out one or two positions,” Orbán explained. “In its old form, the Hungarian right-wing community can no longer function. We need a complete renewal.” He added that the election result marked the close of an entire political era, one defined by his populist nationalist leadership that upended Hungarian democratic norms and strained Budapest’s ties with the European Union and NATO.

Sunday’s poll delivered a stunning rebuke of Orbán, a close ally of former U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who publicly acknowledged defeat just hours after polls closed, describing the outcome as “painful.” Orbán opened up about his personal reaction to the loss Thursday, saying election night sent him on an “emotional roller coaster” that left him feeling “pain and emptiness” in the aftermath. “I too believed we would win,” he said. “We had large crowds of supporters everywhere, and I expected victory.”

Even in defeat, however, Orbán pushed back against narratives that Fidesz has been fully rejected by the Hungarian public, pointing out that the party retained a solid core of support: nearly 2.4 million Hungarians cast ballots for Fidesz in the country of 9.5 million people. “We cannot pretend the entire country rejected our government,” he noted.

Magyar, who defected from Orbán’s circle to launch an anti-corruption campaign focused on pocketbook issues including failing public health care and inadequate public transport, has moved swiftly to cement his transition to power. He has pledged to repair Hungary’s frayed relationships with EU institutions and NATO, a key foreign policy shift from Orbán’s confrontational, Euroskeptic course. Following a private meeting with Hungary’s sitting president on Wednesday, Magyar told reporters he had received confirmation that the inaugural session of the new parliament – where he is all but certain to be confirmed as prime minister – will likely be held on May 6 or 7, matching his push for an accelerated transfer of power.