Trump Calls to Congratulate Erdoğan after Vote Grants Sweeping Powers

US president Donald Trump called to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hours after the Turkish president claimed a narrow victory in a contested referendum that will grant him sweeping new powers, according to the White House.

International observers monitoring the Turkish referendum concluded in a preliminary report on Monday that the campaign and vote took place in a political environment where the “fundamental freedoms essential to a genuinely democratic process were curtailed”.

The US president spoke on Monday with Erdoğan, whose triumph in the constitutional referendum escalated concern over his increasingly authoritarian grip on power, the Guardian reported.

Trump’s congratulatory message strikes a starkly different tone than the statement issued by the US state department on Monday, which urged Erdoğan to respect his citizens’ fundamental rights and noted the report’s findings of “irregularities on voting day and an uneven playing field during the difficult campaign period”.