5 january 2011, home is where the heart is

Back, as usual in the new year, from a brief spell in hungary. Word association around europe is not the country's eu presidency, which began 1 january, but the new "draconian" media law. Despite the coverage, by hardly an uninterested party (or abroad at least, a particularly well-informed one), I'm not sure it's really the return of stalin, but seems certainly another chapter in the sad and long, long running saga of new hungarian government, new party posts at every state level. More unusual are a couple of novel fiscal measures. Most controversial is a new tax imposed on foreign investors, which companies such as e.on, deutsche telekom, allianz, ing bank, axa and omv have all bitterly and publicly blanched at, threatening to pull out of the country altogether, but rendering a total of some eur1.3bn (a UK windfall tax a few years ago on the oil companies pulled in many times more), I suspect protestething rather too much going on. More ominously the new government's nationalist streak is encouraging tens of thousands of new hungarian citizens, despite them living in other - "greater hungary" - countries. My old colleague adam lebor's long-residence in budapest perhaps leads him to underplay this. Perhaps most interestingly, though, and another seesaw policy that changes with each election result, is another push to increase the indigenous population, through reducing income tax for bigger families is an interesting mechanism designed to benefit those that pay taxes in the first place...