The Latest: Polls open in Czech Republic, centrists seek win

The Latest on the four-day voting in the European Union to fill the 751-seat European Parliament (all times local):

2:50 p.m.

Polls have opened for the European Parliament elections in the Czech Republic, with a centrist party led by populist Prime Minister Andrej Babis expected to win despite the fraud charges he faces involving European Union funds.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, right, and his wife Monika Babisova, left, cast their votes in the European elections in Pruhonice near Prague, Czech Republic, Friday May 24, 2019. (Michaela RihovaCTK via AP)

The Czechs on Friday opened their two-day ballot for their country's 21 seats in the 751-seat European Parliament. Voters in the Netherlands and Britain on Thursday kicked off four days of voting across the 28-nation bloc.

Babis' ANO (YES) movement is predicted to win up to 25% of the vote, followed by the moderate euroskeptic Civic Democratic Party and the pro-European Pirate party.

Babis wants his country to remain in the bloc but is calling for EU reforms.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis, left, casts his vote in the European elections in Pruhonice near Prague, Czech Republic, Friday May 24, 2019. (Michaela RihovaCTK via AP)

The country's most ardent anti-EU group, the Freedom and Direct Democracy party, is predicted to win around 10% of the vote and capture its first seats in the EU legislature.

1 p.m.

Protesters are holding rallies in several European Union countries to demand tougher action against global warming, as the 28-nation bloc votes to fill the European Parliament.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar at the polling station in Scoil Thomais, Castleknock as people across the Republic of Ireland go to the polls to vote in the European and local elections along with the referendum on Ireland's divorce laws, in Dublin, Friday May 24, 2019. (Brian LawlessPA via AP)

Thousands attended a rally Friday in Berlin, where mostly young people waved banners with slogans such as "There is no planet B" or "Plant trees, save the bees, clean the seas."

Many protesters will be too young to vote when Germans cast ballots Sunday in the European Parliament election, but are pressing family and older friends to consider the world's long-term future.

Clara Kirchhoff said the election for the EU's 751-seat assembly was particularly important for tackling climate change on a continental level.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar arrives to cast his vote at Scoil Thomais, Castleknock as people across the Republic of Ireland go to the polls to vote in the European and local elections along with the referendum on Ireland's divorce laws, in Dublin, Friday May 24, 2019. (Brian LawlessPA via AP)

The 17-year-old says "there's no point in Germany doing a lot for the climate and others not pulling their weight

8 a.m.

Ireland is going to the polls to kick off the second day of European Union elections which have already caused a stir in the Netherlands.

According to a surprise Ipsos exit forecast late Thursday, the Dutch Labor Party of European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans will become the country's biggest party in the European Parliament.

Britain also voted on Thursday, and in neighboring Ireland polls opened Friday morning. The Czech Republic was set to open two days of voting in the early afternoon.

By Sunday night, all 28 nations will have voted and results will start to come in. The vote is seen as a battle between pro-EU parties and those who seek to wrest power from the EU and back to national capitals.

12:01 a.m.

Pro-European Dutch parties were predicted to win most of the country's seats in the European Parliament, with right-wing populist opponents of the European Union managing to take only four of the nation's 26 seats.

In a surprise forecast, the Dutch Labor Party of European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans on Thursday became the country's biggest party in the 751-seat European Parliament, according to an Ipsos exit poll.

The poll was published by Dutch national broadcaster NOS after polling stations closed Thursday evening in Netherlands. Earlier in the day, Dutch and British voters kicked off the first of four days of voting for the European Parliament in all of the EU's 28 nations.

Official results will only be announced after the last polling station in the EU closes late Sunday.

The Dutch Labor party was forecast to win five seats, while the pro-European center right VVD of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte gained one seat to win a total of four seats. Populists also won four seats.

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — He has been in exile for nearly 50 years. His father — Iran’s shah — was so widely hated that millions took to the streets in 1979, forcing him from power. Nevertheless, Iran’s Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi is trying to position himself as a player in his country’s future.

Pahlavi successfully spurred protesters onto the streets Thursday night in a massive escalation of the protests sweeping Iran. Initially sparked by the Islamic Republic’s ailing economy, the demonstrations have become a serious challenge to its theocracy, battered by years of nationwide protests and a 12-day war in June launched by Israel that saw the U.S. bomb nuclear enrichment sites.

What is unknown is how much real support the 65-year-old Pahlavi, who is in exile in the U.S., has in his homeland. Do protesters want a return of the Peacock Throne, as his father’s reign was known? Or are the protesters just looking for anything that is not Iran’s Shiite theocracy?

Pahlavi issued calls, rebroadcast by Farsi-language satellite news channels and websites abroad, for Iranians to return to the streets Friday night.

“Over the past decade, Iran’s protest movement and dissident community has been increasingly nationalist in tone and tenor,” said Behnam Ben Taleblu, an Iran expert with the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which faces sanctions from Tehran.

“The more the Islamic Republic has failed, the more it has emboldened its antithesis. ... The success of the crown prince and his team has been in drawing a sharp contrast between the normalcy of what was and the promise of what could be, versus the nightmare and present predicament that is the reality for so many Iranians.”

Pahlavi’s profile rose again during President Donald Trump's first term. Still, Trump and other world leaders have been hesitant to embrace him, given the many cautionary tales in the Middle East and elsewhere of Western governments putting their faith in exiles long estranged from their homelands.

Iranian state media, which for years mocked Pahlavi as being out of touch and corrupt, blamed “monarchist terrorist elements” for the demonstrations Thursday night during which vehicles were burned and police kiosks attacked.

Born Oct. 31, 1960, Pahlavi lived in a gilded world of luxury as the crown prince to Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Mohammed Reza had inherited the throne from his own father, an army officer who seized power with support from the British. Mohammed Reza’s rule was cemented by a 1953 CIA-backed coup, and he cooperated closely with the Americans, who sold the autocratic ruler billions of dollars of weapons and spied on the Soviet Union from Iran.

The young Pahlavi was schooled at the eponymous Reza Pahlavi School, set up within the walls of Niavaran Palace in northern Tehran. A biographer of his father noted the crown prince once played rock music in the palace during a New Year’s Eve visit to Tehran by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

But the fall of the Peacock Throne loomed.

While successfully riding rising oil prices in the 1970s, deep economic inequality set in during the shah’s rule and his feared SAVAK intelligence agency became notorious for the torture of dissidents.

Millions across the country participated in protests against the shah, uniting secular leftists, labor unions, professionals, students and Muslim clergy. As the crisis reached a fever pitch, the shah was doomed by his inability to act and poor decisions while secretly fighting terminal cancer.

In 1978, Crown Prince Reza left his homeland for flight school at a U.S. air base in Texas. A year later, his father fled Iran during the onset of what became known as the Islamic Revolution. Shiite clerics squeezed out other anti-shah factions, establishing a new theocratic government that executed thousands after the revolution and to this day remains one of the world’s top executioners.

After his father’s death, a royal court in exile announced that Reza Pahlavi assumed the role of the shah on Oct. 31, 1980, his 20th birthday.

“I can understand and sympathize with your sufferings and your inner torment,” Pahlavi said, addressing Iranians in a speech at the time. “I shed the tears which you must hide. Yet there is, I am sure, light beyond the darkness. Deep in your hearts you may be confident that this nightmare, like others in our history, will pass.”

But what followed has been nearly five decades in exile.

Pahlavi attempted to gain influence abroad. In 1986, The Washington Post reported that the CIA supplied the prince’s allies “a miniaturized television transmitter for an 11-minute clandestine broadcast” to Iran by Pahlavi that pirated the signal of two stations in the Islamic Republic.

“I will return and together we will pave the way for the nation’s happiness and prosperity through freedom,” Pahlavi reportedly said in the broadcast.

That did not happen. Pahlavi largely lived abroad in the United States in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., while his mother, the Shahbanu Farah Pahlavi, lived in Paris.

Circles of diehard Iranian monarchists in exile have long touted dreams of the Pahlavi dynasty returning to power. But Pahlavi has been hampered in gaining wider appeal by a number of factors: bitter memories of his father’s rule; the perception that he and his family are out of touch with their homeland; and repression inside Iran that aims to silence any opposition sentiment.

At the same time, younger generations in Iran born decades after the shah’s rule ended have grown up under a different experience; social restrictions and brutal suppression by the Islamic Republic and economic turmoil under international sanctions, corruption and mismanagement.

Pahlavi has sought to have a voice through social media videos, as well as Farsi-language news channels like Iran International highlighting his calls for protests. The channel also aired QR codes that led to information for security force members within Iran to cooperate with him.

In interviews in recent years, Pahlavi has raised the idea of a constitutional monarchy, perhaps with an elected rather than a hereditary ruler. But he has also said it is up to Iranians to choose.

“This regime is simply irreformable because the nature of it, its DNA, is such that it cannot,” Pahlavi told The Associated Press in 2017. “People have given up with the idea of reform and they think there has to be fundamental change. Now, how this change can occur is the big question.”

He has also faced criticism for his support of and from Israel, particularly after the June war.

“My focus right now is on liberating Iran, and I will find any means that I can, without compromising the national interests and independence, with anyone who is willing to give us a hand, whether it is the U.S. or the Saudis or the Israelis or whomever it is,” he said in 2017.

FILE - Reza Pahlavi, the son of Iran's toppled Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, speaks during a news conference, June 23, 2025 in Paris. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla, File)