Family Backing, State Subsidies, Political Turnabout — How Balogh Levente Became a “Self-Made” Billionaire

The image carefully cultivated around the “self-made” billionaire has taken a dramatic political turn: before the election, Balogh Levente threw his support behind the Tisza Party. But Ellenpont shows that the career of the owner of Szentkiralyi was far from self-started, benefiting first from substantial family backing and later from state support. His political statements, meanwhile, are difficult to reconcile in several respects with his earlier remarks.

2026. 05. 02. 16:39

Balogh Levente (Source: Facebook/Balogh Levente's Official Page)

At the time, he was a supporter of the government, as he had been for the previous 15 years. As he put it one week after the election: “In 2010, I supported Fidesz so Ferenc Gyurcsany could be removed.” The statement was surprising because one week earlier, on election day, he had said: “I’m not a Fidesz supporter, and I never was.”

Hungary’s EU Membership Is A Joke

According to Ellenpont, Balogh Levente’s strangest contradiction with himself is not that, but what he thinks about the European Union. He based his political awakening — and his realization that he stood apart from the NER establishment (setting aside the billions in government support) — on fears that Viktor Orban would take Hungary out of the European Union.

“We are voting on whether to live in the union as Europeans, or in Europe as outcasts,” he told Hungarian voters two days before the election. That would suggest that a commitment to being “European” led Balogh into the Tisza camp. However,

it seems more likely that marketing considerations were at work here as well. Earlier, he was far less committed to Hungary’s EU membership.

Back in 2015, he said he would vote against Hungary’s EU membership because, as long as the country could not adopt the euro, “membership is just a joke.” He also argued that introducing the euro would not be good for Hungary anyway.

This whole thing is a joke. The euro was introduced only in small countries where it makes no difference,

– he told Forbes in 2015.

In the interview, he also emphasized that he would vote against EU membership.

Given that Hungary still does not use the euro, it can be assumed that Balogh’s sense of dissatisfaction with the EU has not eased. In other words, the claim that he fears for Hungary’s EU membership under the Fidesz government is, at the very least, transparent reasoning, Ellenpont argued.