Gyurcsany, 45, was the only candidate for the top post and he won 89.15 percent of the vote at a party congress in the capital, Socialist spokesman Istvan Nyako said.

The overwhelming support for Gyurcsany averted the collapse of the government, as Gyurcsany earlier Saturday threatened to resign as prime minister if he did not win at least 75 percent of the vote.

Gyurcsany said he needed to know that the party was behind him and his unpopular economic reforms at a time when voter support for the Socialists is at its lowest point for a decade.

Since winning re-election last April, Gyurcsany and his party have seen their ratings plummet after the government backtracked on promises to cut taxes and passed severe austerity measures to tackle the public deficit, the highest in the European Union.

Tax hikes, cuts in subsidized household energy prices and the introduction of co-payments for doctor's visits have left the socialists with a voter support of only 17 percent.

The government has also faced street protests, including several days of violent riots after a tape was leaked in September in which Gyurcsany said he knowingly misled voters on the economy to win re-election.

The biggest opposition party, Fidesz, has been trying to rally popular support to force Gyurcsany's resignation and call early elections. Fidesz MPs walk out of parliament every time the prime minister takes the floor.

"Gyurcsany's election is a message to Fidesz that the Socialists are behind the prime minister and that they are not going to oust him," Bernadett Budai, a political analyst at the think tank Vision Consulting, told AFP.

Gyurcsany told his party Saturday that his reform policies, aimed at reining in a public deficit of nearly 10 percent of gross domestic product, were the only viable solution for the country's economic woes after years of loose government spending.

"Hungary must above all focus its energies on re-establishing budget equilibrium and use this to dynamise the economy, which will allow for the creation of a more just society. I cannot offer any alternatives," Gyurcsany said in a speech to party militants.

The only other solutions he said were "populism and national radicalism," as found "from Poland to the Balkans" and "advocated" by Fidesz.

Gyurcsany promised the Socialists that his economic reforms would bear fruit within two years, allowing his party to win back voters and triumph in the 2010 parliamentary elections.

Gyurcsany is no stranger to comebacks.

He took over as prime minister in September 2004 after the Socialists, trailing Fidesz at the time by double-digits in polls, ousted Gyurcsany's unpopular predecessor midway through the election cycle.

Gyurcsany was credited with turning around the rudderless Socialists and leading the party to a shock victory in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Prior to entering politics, Gyurcsany made a fortune in the 1990s during the country's chaotic and corruption-riddled privatisation era. He was also a communist youth leader before the transition to democracy in 1989.

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Airbridge also agreed to provide a 50 million-euro capital injection to the ailing airline and repay 13 billion forint of the company's debt by about year-end, the state privatisation agency APV said in a statement.

"APV is satisfied with the result of the privatisation and the sale will definitely have a positive effect on the airline," the statement said.

It was the government's fourth attempt in less than three years to rid itself of Malev, which closed 2005 with losses of 1.27 billion forint.

Malev's debts of 32 billion forint -- and the state's insistence until recently that the buyer assume all of it -- foiled earlier attempts to sell the airline.

KrasAir, in which the Russian state controls a 51 percent stake, also agreed to pay the interest by 2018 on another 19 billion forint of Malev's debt as well as to use one-fourth of future Malev profits to repay the principal.

KrasAir Chief Executive Boris Abramovich said he hoped to lift Malev out of the red as early as 2009.

"We plan on returning to profitability within two years," he told a press conference in Budapest.

KrasAir, which carried 1.8 million passengers in 2005, is Russia's fifth largest airline and is also part of AiRUnion, an alliance of five Russian airlines, which together carried 4.8 million passengers last year.

Meanwhile Malev, which has a fleet of 29 aircrafts, of which 18 are Next-Generation Boeing 737, carried three million passengers in 2005.

It will be the first central or eastern European airline to join the oneworld alliance when it assumes full membership on April 1. The alliance groups some of the world's biggest carriers, including American Airlines and British Airways.

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European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou urged all member states "to step up their vigilance" and to reassess their risk levels following the outbreak at a goose farm in Csongrad County, southeastern Hungary, according to his spokesman Philip Tod.

An EU-approved laboratory in Britain had confirmed that it "was indeed a case of the H5N1 strain," Tod told a press conference in Brussels.

Meanwhile, the Hungarian authorities announced a suspected second outbreak in the southeast of the country and said they had responded by slaughtering all 9,400 geese on the farm.

"Animals suspected of carrying bird flu were found Friday on a goose farm in Derekegyhaza," about 170 kilometers (105 miles) southeast of Budapest, the agriculture ministry said.

Samples from that farm were also sent to the laboratory in Weybridge, near London, which the Commission uses to confirm such cases.

Tod stressed that in both instances all EU rules had been carried out, including the slaughter of infected flocks, disinfection of affected farms and the setting up of safety zones within a 10-kilometer perimeter.

While assuring that no further measures were necessary, Tod said fresh outbreaks could not be ruled out.

Bildunterschrift: Großansicht des Bildes mit der Bildunterschrift: Europe is alarmed by the recurrence of the virus

But nearby non-EU countries have taken their own measures, with Croatia, Serbia and Russia banning Hungarian poultry exports.

Meanwhile, new EU member Bulgaria responded to the outbreak by banning outdoor poultry markets and putting in place tighter control mechanisms, including border checks, to protect against the spread of bird flu, the agriculture ministry said in a statement.

Four cases of H5N1 were registered in Bulgaria last February in wild swans in the north of the country, but there have been no cases recorded in poultry there.

It is the first incidence in the European Union of the highly pathogenic avian influenza since August 2006, when one case occurred in a zoo in Dresden, Germany. The virus has killed about 160 people worldwide since late 2003.

The origin of the Hungarian outbreak is still being investigated, but wild birds are considered "a strong possibility" by the European Commission.

Between late 2005 and mid-2006, 13 EU nations -- plus Romania, which has since become a member -- uncovered cases of the H5N1 strain.

Jean-Luc Angot, deputy director-general of the World Organization for Animal Health, said in Paris on Monday that the virus found this month in Hungary was "99.4 percent identical" to the strain that caused outbreaks across Europe last year.

The extremely close similarity suggests the virus holed up among birds in Hungary, enabling it to survive after the end of the outbreak last spring, he said.

More than 30 countries have reported outbreaks in the past year

Earlier this month the EU decided to lift its ban on live birds entering the bloc but laid down strict conditions for their import.

EU food chain and veterinary experts decided to replace the ban with strict new guidelines that go beyond the rules that were in place before the embargo was imposed in October 2005 amid an earlier bird flu scare.

Experts have suggested that the exceptionally mild winter might prevent the virus spreading. Last year, the biting cold meant animals herded together, which would facilitate contamination, at a time when animals might also well be weakened by lack of nutrition.

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The Hungarian government, which owns the former Volánbusz building, a Bauhaus-style structure, invested roughly $2.2 million in its resurrection after the bus depot was moved to a larger suburban terminal in 2002. Teampannon, a Budapest-based architecture practice that won a competition to create the Design Center in early 2005, left the building’s two-story rectangular form unchanged. The designers instead restored its deteriorating stone cladding and marble floors, replaced its windows, installed entirely new mechanical systems, and improved the site’s small landscaped plaza. Teampannon then reworked the former ticketing and waiting area into space for rotating exhibitions, meeting rooms, offices, a restaurant, and bookstore.

“The original bus station design was unusual for this neighborhood and represented an important new era for Hungarian architecture after the Second World War,” observes János Golda, one of the firm’s four partners. “The new design center makes the connection between…the classical architecture of an older part of the city and a modern new part. It also introduces a 21st century connection to the harmony of architecture and industrial design.”

Several precedents exist for this kind of redevelopment. Scotland's Centre for Architecture and Design—dubbed “The Lighthouse”—occupies the former Glasgow Herald building, a 19th century structure designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, renovated and expanded in 1999. And, in 2005, Australia’s National Design Centre opened in Melbourne. This project, designed by Lab Architecture, is part of a larger redevelopment scheme called Federation Square that is constructed on a new deck over part of the city’s main railway network.

Hungary has high hopes that the Design Center will bring this country and its wavering economy into the fold of design-conscious international manufacturing. The project might also benefit the surrounding urban fabric. Already, the municipal government has spent $3.9 million to refurbish Erzsébet tér, the square in which the revamped Volánbusz building is located.

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