With a court deadline to elect a new President approaching, Prime Minister Albin Kurti on Wednesday called on opposition leaders to take urgent steps to address the issue, which risks triggering another legislative election only five months after the last one.

Last week, the Constitutional Court ordered MPs to elect a new head of state by October 6 to avoid new snap elections – the fourth parliamentary polls in two years.

“The Constitutional Court verdict … has put us in an urgent situation,” Kurti said. “The election of a new President is possible, and subsequently new repeat, unnecessary and costly elections, with heavy consequences, are [then] avoidable,” he added.

Kurti, who was re-elected Prime Minister less than three weeks ago, wants an agreement to be implemented that has already been reached with the opposition Democratic League of Kosovo, LDK. This would see Bekim Sejdiu, a former Constitutional Court judge and diplomat, take the post of president.

But Sejdiu withdrew from consideration on September 14, following disagreements within the LDK parliamentary group over his candidacy.

“We have Bekim Sejdiu as a candidate who withdrew because six LDK MPs did not agree with the deal. But from Vetevendosje’s point of view, we have a political agreement and we respect it. We don’t have a new name,” Kurti said on Wednesday when pressed on a possible new agreement with the opposition on a fresh candidate.

For a vote electing a President to be valid, at least 80 out of 120 MPs must be present in the chamber. If the first two rounds of voting fail, the third round requires only a simple majority of MPs to elect a President – but at least 80 of them still need to be in the chamber.

Kosovo has been without a President since April 4, when Vjosa Osmani’s five-year term ended. Parliament speaker Albulena Haxhiu from Kurti’s Vetevendosje party is serving as Acting President.

While the deal with the LDK hangs in the balance, the opposition Democratic Party of Kosovo, PDK is meanwhile urging parliament to support amendments to the law on the Specialist Chambers, approved in 2015, which would limit the scope of this court before considering any discussion on a President. This comes after the Hague-based court found four former leaders of the Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA, guilty of war crimes.

On Wednesday, PDK MPs boycotted the work of parliamentary committees in order to press Vetevendosje to proceed with the law change. “Six laws have been brought to the committee today but the Law on the Specialist Chambers is being dragged out because they say it needs expertise. We won’t participate in the committees without proceeding with this law,” Blerta Deliu Kodra, a PDK MP, warned.