Leftist party regains ground

 BY GLENN GARVIN

 MANAGUA -- Putting an end to a humiliating decade-long string of electoral
 beatings, Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista party easily won control of the capital's
 city hall, a victory that party leaders say will catapult them back to power in next
 year's presidential race.

 ``The hour has arrived for the Sandinista Front to return to power!'' exclaimed
 exultant party chief Daniel Ortega, the former president who was swept from office
 in 1990.

 On Monday, with 40 percent of the vote counted, Sandinista candidate Herty
 Lewites had about 43.3 percent, with Wilfredo Navarro of the ruling Liberal
 Constitutional Party trailing with 29.6 percent and the Conservative Party's
 William Báez at 25.4 percent. Both Navarro and Báez conceded defeat Monday
 morning.

 The count was slower in the other 150 Nicaraguan cities that held elections
 Sunday. But it appeared that the Liberals, while continuing to hold a solid majority
 of city halls across the country, might lose several other key provincial capitals.

 ``Sunday was a black day for the Liberals,'' flatly declared a business executive
 who has been a strong supporter of the party.

 The Liberal government of President Arnoldo Alemán has been rocked by a series
 of corruption scandals, with the president often slow to repudiate Liberal officials
 caught in compromising situations.

 Meanwhile, the president badly overestimated his own strength, cooperating with
 the Sandinistas in a gerrymandering of Managua city boundaries that excluded a
 popular Conservative candidate, Pedro Solórzano. When Solórzano -- a
 businessman who organized Managua's much-loved annual Ben Hur chariot races
 -- was booted out of the race earlier this year, several polls showed him with more
 than 50 percent of the vote.

 ``That was a disastrous decision,'' said one high government official. ``Alemán
 thought with Solórzano gone, the Liberals would win easily.''

 Instead, the winner was the 61-year-old Lewites, who was
 `The hour has arrived for the Sandinista Front to return to power.'
 

                                             -- DANIEL ORTEGA,

 former president of Nicaragua

 tourism minister when the Sandinistas ruled from 1979 to 1990. He promised to
 be a mayor ``for all the different Managuas, without regard to political colors,
 religion or economic condition . . . to move forward on the enormous problems of
 this city.''

 Lewites pledged to run an independent city hall that won't be ``a political
 barracks'' for the Sandinista party, hiring party militants and bankrolling giveaways
 intended to buy votes in next year's presidential election.

 And even some political opponents who bitterly criticized the Sandinistas during
 the final days of the election conceded that Lewites has neither the power nor the
 inclination to force a return to the Marxist policies that wrecked the Nicaraguan
 economy when the party ruled in the 1980s.

 ``I don't think anything will change,'' said Roberto Terán, head of COSEP,
 Nicaragua's national business organization. ``We're in the year 2000 here. I don't
 think we're going back to the past.''

 Terán and many other political analysts said the election results represented a
 ``punishment vote'' against Alemán's Liberals rather than any groundswell of
 support for the Sandinistas.

 ``This was a vote against the way the government has conducted itself,'' Terán
 said, using his fingers to tick off a long list of corruption scandals that have
 erupted during Alemán's administration. ``I have told the president he has to shift
 the way he does business, but so far he isn't listening.''

 Lewites' percentage of the vote was only slightly bigger than the 38 percent that
 the Sandinistas picked up in 1996 presidential elections. But the Conservatives,
 who won only a handful of votes in 1996, surged in Sunday's contest, splitting the
 anti-Sandinista vote.

 ``The real lesson is that the Conservatives and Liberals have to talk to each other
 and cooperate in the presidential election, or we're going to wind up with a
 Sandinista president,'' said one Conservative Party leader.