Turkish president declares victory in referendum to increase his power; opposition cries foul

ANKARA, Turkey �� Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan claimed victory Sunday in a referendum on granting him broad new powers, as opposition parties alleged fraud.

With 98 percent of ballots counted, the state-run Anadolu news agency said Turks approved the most radical constitutional overhaul since the republic was founded 93 years ago, 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent. The election board's official tally was yet to be released.

A "yes" vote would give Erdogan authority to appoint ministers and top judges at his discretion, and to call elections at any time.

But as the president was calling "yes" campaigners to congratulate them, much of the opposition claimed foul play. Erdal Aksunger, the deputy head of the Republican Peopl's Party, the largest opposition group, said Anadolu was "manipulating" results as it announced them.

Erdogan's campaign appealed to patriotic voters, especially those in the small towns in the Anatolian heartland, which voted "yes" overwhelmingly. Rural Turks want a strong president to combat the resurgence of terrorism, fight Kurdish separatism and defend Turkey's global interests.

Support in urban centers was much weaker. The nation's largest city, Istanbul, where the ruling Justice and Development party Erdogan founded has never lost a general election, looked set to reject it. So did Turks in the capital city, Ankara, and more secular coastal towns along the Aegean Sea, like Izmir. Voter turnout was 87 percent among the 58 million Turks eligible to cast ballots, according to projections.

While narrow, the victory is a remarkable turnaround for a president who just nine months ago faced down an attempted military coup. The uprising was quickly crushed and, armed with a popular mandate to consolidate his rule, Turkey's leader of 14 years now has room to crack down further on his opponents. In the nine months since imposing a state of emergency, he's fired more than 100,000 people and jailed 40,000, among them academics, journalists and judges.

The opposition's complaints came after Turkey's High Election Board decided in the final hours of voting on Sunday that ballot papers without the usual stamps indicating they're authentic can be counted unless they're proven to have been brought in from outside.

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(Benjamin Harvey contributed to this report.)