ISTANBUL — Turkey’s Kurds rang in their traditional new year on Thursday while bracing for a critical election this month that the region’s biggest party hopes will deliver a clear rebuke against the government’s crackdown on its political movement.

The leftist Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), whose base is overwhelmingly Kurdish, is seeking to recapture control of cities across the predominately Kurdish southeast in the March 31 poll after the government removed 94 of its 102 mayors from their offices beginning in 2016 and replaced them with government-appointed “trustees.”

Beyond the southeast, the HDP has decided against fielding mayoral candidates in several cities, hoping its supporters will instead back the main opposition bloc to help it wrest control of municipalities like Istanbul and the capital Ankara, which has been dominated by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) and its predecessor since the mid-1990s. The AKP has formed an alliance with the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party (MHP).

The HDP strategy comes as thousands of its party activists and elected officials sit in jail on charges of aiding Kurdish militants in the wake of the government’s failed peace process to end a three-decade insurgency. With the end of talks in 2015, Turkey was thrust into one of its most violent periods, with almost 3,000 people killed in clashes between the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and Turkish security forces.