[1] Lothar de Maizière of the CDU invited the SPD to join his Alliance partners – the German Social Union (DSU) and Democratic Awakening (DA) – in a grand coalition.

The election, originally scheduled for May, was brought forward to March 18 after negotiations between representatives of the Round Table and government of Hans Modrow on 28 January.

Civil rights activists had managed to secure offices in many places, meaning both the new groups and old parties were often lacking less in physical infrastructure and more in political and campaign experience.

Meanwhile, the CDU was deprived of a natural base by the lack of any significant Catholic population in the country, with the sole exception of Eichsfeld on the Thuringian border.

At the SPD's party conference in Berlin in December 1989, he warned of a "national drunkenness" that reunification could inspire, and described the potential membership of a united Germany in NATO as "historical nonsense".

[7] Three days before the election the lead candidate of Democratic Awakening, Wolfgang Schnur, was exposed as a Stasi informant by Der Spiegel.

Its key points included German reunification using the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany as an all-German constitution, the establishment of rights to private property and unrestricted freedom of trade, the abolition of all barriers to access for investors from the West, and the immediate introduction of the Deutsche Mark with an exchange rate of 1:1 to the East German mark.

Other points were the promotion of monument protection, education reform, the preservation of day nurseries, the re-establishment of the federal states (Länder) and freedom of the press.

It sought to preserve the GDR's social values and achievements, which it held to include the right to work, the system of children's institutions, the involvement of cooperative and public property in the economy, and anti-fascism and internationalism.

In 2009, 20 years after the Peaceful Revolution, he commented on the development of democracy in the GDR: "The Bonn hippopotamus came in such a mass that you were simply helpless.

"[12] In 2005, Forschungsgruppe Wahlen researcher Matthias Jung, who was involved in organising opinion polling for the election, spoke of the difficulties of the task.

He attributed this to the unpredictable behaviour of the electorate as well as the total lack of infrastructure and methods for gauging public opinion, which forced the institute to build an entirely new polling model.

Despite beginning work at the end of 1989, FW only released one poll before the election, which Jung claimed accurately predicted the CDU victory.

This was possible since the original election results were declared on the Kreis level, and the states were re-established by simply amalgamating Kreise together.

Four days later, after protracted negotiations, Lothar de Maizière announced the formation of a grand coalition between the Alliance for Germany, SPD, and BFD.

On 21 June, the Volkskammer formed a special committee, chaired by Joachim Gauck, to control the dissolution of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi).

The treaty took effect on 3 October 1990; on the same day, 144 of the 400 Volkskammer deputies became members of the Bundestag (63 from the CDU, 33 from the SPD, 24 from the PDS, 9 from the BFD, 8 from the DSU, and 7 from Alliance 90 and the Green Party).