Turkey’s highest court turned down on Thursday the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party’s (HDP) request to postpone until the crucial elections in May court proceedings of a case seeking its disbandment, in a move further complicating the country’s tangled electoral outlook.

The request to reschedule the court proceedings until after the presidential and parliamentary elections expected to be held on May 14 was unanimously rejected by the Constitutional Court, the state broadcaster TRT reported.

HDP was founded in 2012 and entered the Turkish parliament in 2015 elections in which the AKP lost its majority to form the government. The party emerged as the country’s second largest opposition party in the 2018 general elections by getting 11.7% of the votes.

The HDP has faced the threat of closure since the court accepted in 2021 an indictment seeking to shut down the party and ban more than 450 of its members from politics over their alleged ties with outlawed armed Kurdish militants. The court also rejected a two-month extension request by the party to argue against the court’s decision earlier this month to freeze the treasury funding allocated for the HDP.