(Bloomberg) -- Early results in Turkey’s presidential election showed Recep Tayyip Erdogan heading for another term as president, gaining near-absolute authority in a revamped political system. The main opposition disputed the count, saying there were clear signs of manipulation.

With about one-third of ballots counted, Erdogan had 58 percent of the vote to 28 percent for his closest challenger, Muharrem Ince of the secular Republican People’s Party, or CHP, according to the official Anadolu news agency. No other candidate was above 8 percent.

In the parliamentary vote, Erdogan’s AK Party and its nationalist ally had 63 percent, to 27 percent for the opposition coalition, as of 7:10 pm in Istanbul.

“We’re good,” Erdogan said an hour earlier in Istanbul, though he declined to speculate on the outcome.

Ince, who’d earlier warned of the risk of vote fraud, said he was headed to the office of the electoral watchdog, ready to file any objections. In the capital Ankara, municipal trucks loaded with sand blocked a road outside Erdogan’s presidential palace.

The CHP, which placed a monitor at each polling station, said that its own early count was radically different, showing Erdogan at 47 percent and Ince around 40 percent. There are signs of “open manipulation,” said deputy leader Bulent Tezcan.

Presidential Power

Erdogan has presided over an economic boom that’s threatened to turn into a bust in recent months, as the currency plunged and capital fled. Under his government, Turkey’s ties with its western allies have also come under unprecedented strain, as Erdogan increasingly sided with Russia in the Syrian civil war, fulcrum of a great-power contest for Middle East influence.

In this election, which Erdogan brought forward by 18 months, victory for the incumbent doesn’t mean no change. Last year, Erdogan drove through constitutional reforms that shift Turkey toward a U.S.-style political system, eliminating the office of prime minister and handing the president powers to pass laws by decree, pick cabinet ministers from outside the legislature, force new elections and declare a state of emergency. If he wins, Erdogan will become the first leader to formally exercise them.

The prospect of presidential rule helped galvanize Erdogan’s rivals, who promised to undo all the changes and reinstate Turkey’s century-old traditions of parliamentary democracy. Ince and other candidates accused Erdogan of presiding over an increasingly arbitrary system in which political opponents, journalists, judges and students were at risk of landing in jail.

After surviving a coup attempt in 2016, Erdogan embarked on an unprecedented purge of the civil service, judiciary and education system that sent tens of thousands to prison on charges of complicity in the putsch.

The president and his allies campaigned on the contrast between today’s prosperous Turkey and the political and economic turmoil that preceded Erdogan’s rule, pointing to GDP growth rates averaging almost 6 percent since the AK Party came to power in 2002.

To contact the reporters on this story: Ben Holland in Istanbul at bholland1@bloomberg.net;Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara at shacaoglu@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Benjamin Harvey at bharvey11@bloomberg.net, Justin Carrigan

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