Parties Agree on New E. German Coalition : Politics: Conservatives will hold 11 of 24 ministries. Talks on unification with West Germany can now begin.

After prolonged negotiations, East Germany’s new political leadership agreed Monday on a broad, conservative-led coalition to guide the country toward unification with West Germany.

The agreement means that the process of negotiating that unity can now begin in earnest.

“It’s nearly certain that we’ll have the grand coalition we’ve been striving for,” Prime Minister-designate Lothar de Maiziere said.

De Maiziere said his victorious Christian Democrats will hold 11 of 24 government ministries. The moderate left-wing Social Democrats, who finished a distant second in the voting, will hold seven portfolios and the centrist Liberals will hold three. Two small right-wing parties that allied with the Christian Democrats in the March 18 election--the German Social Union and Democratic Awakening--will take two seats and one seat, respectively.

The leader of the Social Democrats, Markus Meckel, a 37-year-old Protestant pastor, was named foreign minister.

He will represent a government of political neophytes that has also placed a clergyman and pacifist as defense minister. Rainer Eppelmann, a Protestant pastor and co-founder of Democratic Awakening, will effectively take charge of what was once considered the Warsaw Pact’s premier fighting force, the East German army.

Eppelmann was jailed both for refusing to do active military service and later for opposing deployment of Soviet nuclear missiles in East Germany.

Comments by Meckel following Monday’s talks indicated that the Social Democrats may be prepared to back a compromise formula on the role of a united Germany in a post-Cold War Europe.

West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher has proposed a united Germany inside the North Atlantic Treaty Organization but with no NATO forces stationed in what is now East Germany.

Talking to reporters, Meckel said that he is against the stationing of NATO forces in East Germany but fell short of rejecting NATO membership.

Among other portfolios announced Monday, 61-year-old Social Democrat economist Walter Romberg will become finance minister, and Peter-Michael Diestel, 38, general secretary of the German Socialist Union, will be named interior minister and also have the title of deputy prime minister.

The distribution of portfolios is expected to be formally approved today by all member parties.

The involvement of the Liberals and Social Democrats in the conservative-led coalition means that the government can, in theory, count on the backing of nearly three-quarters of the 400-member Parliament. Such support is expected to give political legitimacy to the tough decisions involved in the unity process and also facilitate constitutional changes that will be required.

Monday’s agreement also leaves the Communists as the only major opposition party.

The composition of the new Cabinet means that political forces supported by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl will hold a clear majority in the new East German government. Such an alignment is expected to ease work on sensitive decisions leading to German unity, such as a currency union in which the West German deutschemark will become the all-German currency, replacing the non-convertible East German ostmark.

The leaderships in both Bonn and East Berlin are pushing for implementation by July 1, but the terms have become highly controversial. Last Friday, hundreds of thousands of East Germans demonstrated in several cities in favor of a straight 1-for-1 exchange rate. They went into the streets after the conclusions of a West German Bundesbank report, which recommended in most instances an exchange rate of two ostmarks for each deutschemark, were leaked to the West German press.