he was proclaimed emperor in his own right with the regnal name of Haile Selassie. Since 1945 South Africa It may be impractical to hold a new referendum for each step of a series of negotiated changes, and thus ministers might ask an electorate for plenipotentiary powers in advance, as occurred in the South African apartheid referendum, 1992. Prior to the referendum, the state president F. W. de Klerk had already implemented extensive reforms (e.g., removing the Group Areas Act). However, his right to negotiate these reforms was questioned by other parties (e.g., Andries Treurnicht's Conservative Party), particularly in response to the National Party's Potchefstroom by-election defeat in February 1992. Given how heavily entrenched apartheid was in the South African legal system at the time, de Klerk needed to nullify many previous bills and pass many new ones, making a series of individual referendums impractical. Consequently, as a practical solution to the political deadlock, de Klerk held a referendum on 17 March 1992 to ask the white South African electorate to give him plenipotentiary powers. Russia On 18 May 2000, in the post-Soviet Russian Federation the title Plenipotentiary of the President was established for the appointees of the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, in each of the seven federal districts created on 13 May: Dalnevostochny (Far Eastern), Privolzhsky (Volga Region), Severo-Zapadny (North Western), Sibirsky (Siberian), Tsentralny (Central), Uralsky (Ural), and Yuzhny (Southern). Translation This word has been voted as one of the ten English words that are the hardest to translate in June 2004 by Today Translations, a British translation company. However, the word in almost exactly the same form exists in at least some of the Romance languages (such as Portuguese - plenipotenciário; French - plénipotentiaire; Romanian - plenipotențiar; Spanish - plenipotenciario; Italian - plenipotenziario) with exactly the same meaning; the Albanian word i/e plotfuqishëm sounds similar, although it has native roots. Other languages have their own equivalents; for instance, German - Bevollmächtigt(er) (adjective or noun), Dutch - gevolmachtigd(e), Danish - fuldmægtig, Swedish - fullmäktig, Norwegian - fullmektig (all these Germanic cases are literal parallels); Serbian - punomoćan (пуномоћан in Cyrillic); Russian - полномочный (полный "full", мочь "to be in power, to be able"); Czech - zplnomocněný (plno "full", moc "power"); Slovak - splnomocnený (plno "full", moc "power"); Slovenian - pooblaščeni (adjective) or pooblaščênec (noun); Polish - pełnomocnik (pełno "of full", moc "power"); Bulgarian - пълномощен (pǎlnomošten); Finnish -