Two Germanys Agree to Joint Elections in December : Reunification: The decision means there will be one nation less than 13 months after the wall began to fall.

The two Germanys announced agreement Tuesday to hold joint national elections in December for a single Parliament, a move that will effectively complete the whirlwind process of reunification.

The decision on a December election, two days after East and West Germany forged an economic, social and currency union and ended controls along their common border, means that the two Germanys will be fully unified less than 13 months after the Berlin Wall began to come apart Nov. 9.

“That was the deadline desire by Bonn and expresses the inner logic of the unity we seek,” noted Helmut Lueck, a spokesman for East Germany’s Christian Democrats, the largest party of the country’s broad ruling coalition.

The date of Dec. 2 proposed by East German Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere is seen as the most likely date, although Dec. 9 also remains a possibility, a spokesman for the West German government said.

West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s ruling coalition is scheduled to meet later today to confirm one of the two December dates.

The East German government also announced Tuesday that negotiations on a second state treaty between the two Germanys to deal with the legal and political mechanics involved in completing unification will begin Friday in East Berlin.

East German State Secretary Guenther Krause told reporters that official-level talks could be completed by early August, with a draft treaty ready by early September.

Although it is the convening of an all-German Parliament that will symbolically crown the unification process, the exact legal timing of unity remains uncertain.

The major parties in both Germanys now accept that unification will come under Article 23 of the 1949 West German constitution, which permits East Germany to accede whenever it chooses.

Kohl has argued that the accession should occur on election night, a move that would give smaller East German parties, mainly those forces that launched last autumn’s revolution, a chance to win seats in the new Parliament. With such timing, they would not be subjected to West German election laws that require a minimum of 5% of the popular vote to enter Parliament.

Opposition Social Democrats, however, have called for an earlier accession, so the elections would occur within a single nation.

With this timing, the possibility would exist that not a single major figure from last autumn’s East German revolution would be a part of the all-German Parliament their actions helped create.

Most belong to weak, ill-organized parties that were overwhelmed in East Germany’s first free elections last March by hastily created or expanded clones of the established West German parties.

The December election date represents another significant triumph for Kohl, who has consistently managed to push the pace of unity, arguing that to move slowly would only invite political uncertainty in both Germanys and heighten the economic costs of fusing the two countries.

“The faster it goes, the less the financial liability,” summed up West German Finance Minister Theo Waigel.

With the opposition Social Democrats in disarray, initial polls indicate that an early election would favor Kohl’s center-right coalition.

Last week, the Mannheim University Election Research Group published a survey predicting defeat for the Social Democrats.

But observers note there are also external considerations for a speedy election, with Kohl and his foreign minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, also forcing the pace of unification in response to the apparent erosion of Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s power in Moscow.

German unification is viewed with suspicion and foreboding among conservatives in the Soviet Union, which lost as many as 27 million people during World War II.

The date adds considerable pressure to those involved in international negotiations linked to the German unity question.

While East German leaders described the election date as conditional upon completion of the talks between the two Germanys and the four World War II victors--France, Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States--observers believe it would be politically dangerous for the four to be seen as thwarting the will of a democratic Germany.

The six-nation talks, which must lead to agreement on the external security aspects of unification, have been slowed by a Soviet reluctance to permit a united Germany to be a full, integrated member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Both Germanys and the three remaining allies favor such NATO membership.

Under the present timetable, the talks must be completed by November, so that the results can be blessed by a conference of the United States, Canada and all European nations except Albania. The conference is scheduled for Paris in late November.