David Chance

BUDAPEST, Apr 12 (Reuters) Viktor Orban, Hungary's conservative icon, withdrew his candidacy for prime minister today in a bid to salvage the fractured right's hopes ofunseating the Socialist-led government in elections.

A political source said Orban's Fidesz party had nominated former central banker Peter Akos Bod instead, in an effort to get the smaller Hungarian Democratic Forum (MDF) to support it in the second round of Hungary's election on April 23.

''We have proposed a candidate for prime minister from the Hungarian Democratic Forum's side,'' Orban, 42, told a news conference, without saying who had been nominated.

Neither Fidesz nor the MDF would confirm Bod had been named.

Some analysts said the offer was a ploy designed to be rejected by the Democratic Forum, which could then be blamed by Fidesz for losing to the ex-communist left, an outcome which looks inevitable with or without Orban.

Orban shot to prominence by calling in 1989 for Soviet troops to withdraw from Hungary, at the reburial of Imre Nagy who led an anti-Soviet uprising in 1956 and and was later executed.

Orban was prime minister between 1998 and 2002, then Europe's youngest at just 35. A patriotic hero to the right, he is hated by his opponents who call his brash language, peppered with references to the Socialists' communist past, out of tune with a country now a member of the European Union.

A source in Fidesz, which Orban leads, told Reuters: ''He realised he was too divisive a figure.'' Bod, 54, was in the first post-communist MDF government as industry minister.

He later went to the central bank, but resigned under pressure from then Socialist Prime Minister Gyula Horn in 1994 as the country teetered on the edge of a financial crisis.

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