News

The Czech Republic's eight million voters have begun casting their ballots in elections to the Czech lower house. The polls opened at two o'clock on Friday afternoon, and will close at ten on Friday night, before opening again on Saturday at eight am and closing at two in the afternoon, when vote-counting will begin. No party is expected to win a majority and either the governing Social Democrats or the Civic Democratic Party are expected to get the most seats in the 200-seat lower house.

Among the first to cast their ballots were President Vaclav Havel and the outgoing prime minister, Milos Zeman, as well as the leaders of several of the biggest parties.

The first reactor at the Temelin nuclear power station in south Bohemia went back into operation on Thursday night despite statements by officials at the plant earlier on Thursday that it would be shut down for a week to deal with a suspected leak. The power station is once again supplying electricity to the national grid. Temelin has suffered from repeated faults since the launch of the plant began in October 2000, and critics say it is unsafe.

Polling stations at Czech embassies and consulates opened for Czech citizens living abroad on Thursday. This year's election is the first time Czech ex-pats have been allowed to take part in elections in their home country. Polling booths in the Czech Republic will not open until Friday afternoon, but Czechs living abroad are being asked to vote a day earlier to eradicate problems with the time difference, especially in the Americas. Czech embassies and consulates have registered minimal interest in the elections, and only a few hundred Czech citizens living abroad are expected to vote. According to unofficial estimates there are about 70,000 Czech citizens living abroad, many of whom have criticised the fact that they have to travel to distant embassies rather than cast their votes by post.

Germany's conservative candidate for chancellor, Edmund Stoiber, has said the abolition of the so-called Benes decrees is not a condition for Czech admission to the European Union, but the two issues are connected. Mr Stoiber, leader of the opposition Christian Social Union party, said he hoped the Czech Republic would start dealing with history more openly after the elections. Some two and a half million ethnic Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia in 1945, under decrees signed by President Eduard Benes. Politicians in Germany and Austria have called for the decrees to be abolished before the Czech Republic is allowed to join the EU.