The Leader programme was launched to realign the mainstreaming of the European Union’s development policy. In the program period 2004 – 2006 in Hungary, the community initiative was a measure of the National Development Plan’s Operative Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development. The article reveals the experiences of the introduction of the program focusing on the activity of local enterprises in three selected micro-regions of the West-Pannon Region. Results show that the activity of enterprises in the applications has remained at a low level. The main reasons revealed are the following: (a) national level orientation lagged far behind the required extent at the launching of programme, (b) the support rate of the entrepreneurial sector is lower than in case of other ones, (c) the self-government sector utilized a considerable amount of funding sources of application titles.
