Political Parties

David Levy, prodigal son of the center-right Likud Party, agreed Tuesday to merge his newly formed Gesher Party with Likud in upcoming parliamentary elections. Levy's return was seen as a political victory for Likud leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who has cleared the field of right-wing candidates for prime minister and brought the race down to a two-man fight with Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Israeli elections are scheduled for May 29. Until Feb.

In something of a shotgun marriage, the two leaders of Turkey's rival center-right parties signed a pledge of loyalty Sunday to a new coalition intended to keep a pro-Islamic party from power. One television news program played an upbeat wedding march as it showed footage of the signing ceremony.

The conservative Popular Party--the party tied to the 1939-1975 fascist dictatorship of Gen. Francisco Franco--declared victory in Spain's election Sunday, saying it had ended the scandal-plagued Socialists' 13 years in power. Jose Maria Aznar, leader of the Popular Party, told thousands of followers in a victory speech that he would represent "all Spain" as prime minister and pledged to offer "a hand held out in tolerance."

For a half-century, Ruby Johnson's voting record was unblemished: a straight Democratic ballot all the way. But not this year. Johnson was among hundreds of Los Angeles County voters stunned Tuesday to discover that they have been mysteriously re-registered into new political parties that qualified in California last fall, according to county officials.

Leading members of Northern Ireland's pro-British Protestant unionist party will attend the White House's St. Patrick's Day celebrations next week while their Sinn Fein foes will be excluded because of IRA violence. David Trimble, leader of the mainstream Ulster Unionist Party, has accepted an invitation from President Clinton to attend the festivities. "It is a dramatic turn of events.

Selecting a presidential candidate is a problem for any political party, but so is sustaining the party at the grass roots. What happens there largely determines popular commitment to the political system. There are many reasons for the demise of party influence at the local level, but there is a new experiment in Los Angeles that, if not a resurrection of the party machine, is as close as you can get to one in a nonpartisan world.

Like ancient feuding neighbors forced together by a common threat, the state Republican and Democratic parties are running to douse a political wildfire: Proposition 198, the open primary initiative on Tuesday's ballot. To hear the parties describe it, Proposition 198 would make them almost useless by blurring their messages and diluting party affiliations.

All right, here's a ballot measure that really would change things for voters, at least in primary elections. In fact, this proposal offers the most significant shake-up of California's election system in nearly four decades. No mere message sending, as with illegal immigration and Proposition 187. No disappointing delays, as with insurance rebates and Proposition 103. This measure truly would make a difference for voters, starting with the next elections.

Just as both political parties gear up for the 1996 elections, the Supreme Court announced Friday that it would hear a free-speech challenge to the federal election rules that limit spending by state and national parties. The ruling, due by July, could free the parties to pour vast amounts of money into the 1996 elections. But the legal challenge does not threaten the other two pillars of the federal election laws, which restrict contributions and require public disclosure.

Tomiichi Murayama, who abruptly resigned as Japan's prime minister last week, overwhelmingly won reelection as Socialist Party chairman Tuesday to face the daunting task of averting his party's annihilation in national elections later this year. Murayama trounced Tadatoshi Akiba, a U.S.-trained mathematician and liberal challenger in what was billed as a battle for the party's soul.