Mr Duarte comes from the national-socialist wing of the Colorados, which has long blocked change.

ECONOMIST: The unpaid bills of creole fascism

Even so, the instant discarding of 40 years of national-socialist commercial culture is likely to create serious distortions.

ECONOMIST: If it all works out, Iraq will be a capitalist's dream

Jeff Hall was the regional director for a neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement, and had led Nazi-style rallies in his hometown of Riverside, according to the Press-Enterprise newspaper.

BBC: Boy found responsible for killing neo-Nazi father

Five Polish men have been convicted of carrying out the theft on behalf of a Swedish man, Anders Hoegstroem, who helped found the far-right National Socialist Front party in Sweden in 1994.

BBC: Auschwitz museum unveils restored stolen sign

Such was the support for Jean-Marie Le Pen, the National Front leader, that he evicted the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, in the first round.

ECONOMIST: Zut alors, even Britain is ahead

And the national parliament was moved out of its Stalin-era stone fortress, adorned with Soviet frescoes of happy socialist workers, into a modernist glass dome.

BBC: Stalin anniversary: Georgian supporters leap to defence

His pro-Cuban, socialist policies are also controversial domestically and have increasingly polarized the nation and national media, according to the Atlanta-based Carter Center, which provided election monitors in the nation's 2006 presidential elections.

CNN: Venezuela's Chavez appears chipper, energetic on state TV

The group, which wants a socialist state and is vehemently anti-American, according to the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center, is listed as a terrorist organization by the U.S. The DHKP-C has been relatively quiet in recent years, but has used suicide bombers in the past, including in an attempt on a police station in September, in which a policeman died along with the attacker.

WSJ: Security in Ankara Is Adequate, U.S. Says; Leftist Group Suspected in Blast

This multiplicity adds democratic spice and entertainment value, but for mainstream candidates it can cause serious problems as it did most notoriously in April 2002, when the National Front's Jean-Marie Le Pen squeezed into the run-off against Jacques Chirac, ousting the Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin.

ECONOMIST: The French presidential race

In fact, the only thing that separated the two main branches of 20th-century totalitarianism was that the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was born of an international movement while the National Socialist German Workers Party was explicitly nationalist.

FORBES: Liberal Fascism