YOU'VE GOT TO fight for your right to party. That's what participants in the Love Parade, Berlin's annual celebration of club music, open-air sex and mind-altering substances, are finding out this year. A local action group has booked the parade route for the traditional second weekend in July, leaving one-and-a-half-million techno tourists with no place to shake their booties. In their scramble to find a solution, Love Parade organizers are getting help from unusual quarters: the conservative politicians in the city's ruling Christian Democratic Union coalition.

The conflict stems from the Love Parade's historical status as a political demonstration. In 1988, local DJs and club owners discovered that the easiest way to get permission for a public rave was to have it masquerade as a protest march. They invented a few nonsensical slogans, loaded turntables and speakers onto flatbed trucks, and set off through the streets of West Berlin with several hundred dancing "protesters" in tow. From these relatively humble beginnings, the Love Parade became a national, then an international event. By 1998, it was attracting upwards of 1.8 million participants, two-thirds of them tourists. A porno movie was shot atop one of the trucks, and organizers were selling corporate sponsors advertising space and the concession rights to rehydrate ravers with warm beer and Coke. Yet the Love Parade remained, technically at least, a non-profit political assemblage, and as such was not required to pay a single mark of the attendant costs, which ranged in the millions, for things like security and sanitation. The organizers could simply rake in the proceeds from the party, while the city, much to the dismay of local environmentalists, footed the bill for sweeping up afterward.

The problem this year is that Planetcom, the company behind the Love Parade, was late in filing for the demonstration permit and got beaten to the punch. By the time they got around to applying, the fourteenth of July already belonged the "Friends of the Tiergarten," a citizens' group irate at the 300 tons of trash and high volumes of urine annually deposited by ravers in Berlin's equivalent of Central Park. Even the following weekend had been booked -- by "Action 2000," a bicyclists' and rollerbladers' demonstration. As yet, no solution has been found to the impasse. Negotiations between Parade organizers, city officials and environmental protesters about alternate routes and dates have resulted in more acrimony than compromises. Planetcom boss Enric Nitzsche, for instance, is suing Action 2000 over an anti-Love Parade poster, adapted from a famous John Heartfield collage, in which he was cast as Hitler. Such chaos has already led two prominent DJs to cancel their appearances. At present it is unclear whether Berlin's biggest party will happen this year at all.

Ironically, the ravers' best allies have been their usual worst enemies, conservative politicians who fear the loss of the estimated 250 million marks in tourist revenue to the city. Berlin's law-and-order Senator for Public Affairs, Eckart Werthebach, normally something of a Prussian Rudy Giuliani, has been particularly vocal in his support for the event. He "deeply regretted" the bureaucratic log-jam and supports a proposal that the Love Parade be declared a local special event akin to the carnival celebrations in Cologne. If Planetcom agrees to give up its status as a political demonstration, the Love Parade can take place on July 21st. Has the party saved the party? It's up to Planetcom in any case, the city has been treated to the surreal spectacle of the Christian Democratic Union sticking up for the public's right to sex, drugs and high decibel levels. The Love Parade has gotten a lesson in politics, and Christian politicians have learned a new way to rave.