BANGKOK: Thailand’s prime minister urged anti-government protesters Wednesday to vent their anger against her at the ballot box, insisting that elections were the best way to solve the country’s deepening political crisis.

Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra has faced weeks of mass street demonstrations seeking to force her elected government from office and install an appointed “people’s council” in its place.

Some hardline protesters threatened to blockade the stock exchange and an air traffic control facility if Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra had not stepped down by a deadline media said was set for 8 p.m. (1300 GMT).

There was no apparent movement as the deadline came and went.

The unrest, which flared in early November and escalated this week when demonstrators occupied main intersections of the capital, is the latest chapter in an eight-year conflict.

The political fault line pits the Bangkok-based middle class and royalist establishment against the mostly poorer, rural supporters of Yingluck and her brother, Thaksin Shinawatra, a former premier ousted by the military in 2006 who is seen as the power behind her government.

Many of her opponents, who include much of the country’s royalist establishment, do not want the February polls to go ahead, fearing they will only return the Shinawatra family or its allies to power.

They say electoral reforms are needed before a vote is held in at least a year’s time, but deny they are seeking to suspend the country’s fragile democratic system.

Yingluck invited protest leaders and political parties to discuss a proposal to delay the general election, which she has called for Feb. 2, but her opponents snubbed her invitation.

After the meeting, the government said the poll would go ahead as scheduled, and it derided the leader of the protest movement, Suthep Thaugsuban.