Controversy flared around Erdogan after he said earlier this week that opposition parties were ganging up to stop his AK party winning more seats in the Kurdish southeast, and that a recording would be released to prove it.

“I think the voice recordings will be published today or tomorrow,” Erdogan said in a televised campaign speech in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir on Wednesday.

The recordings were released on Thursday.

The frank admission of foreknowledge stunned some political commentators in a country where many people avoid talking on the telephone about politics for fear that someone is listening in.

“I was frozen for a moment when I heard him say this on television,” Murat Yetkin wrote in Radikal newspaper on Friday.

“The prime minister was announcing a recording of a conversation between two members of another political party and was saying it would be released on the internet soon,” Yetkin said in a column that drew parallels with the Watergate scandal that brought down US President Richard Nixon in 1974.

Campaigning for re-election on June 12, and assured of a victory, according to opinion polls, Erdogan has promoted himself as a champion of democracy, and is planning to rewrite the constitution during his third consecutive term in office.

Critics accuse his religiously conservative party of having a secret Islamic agenda, an accusation which it rejects.

The recording at the center of the row allegedly caught two members of the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) discussing plans for strategic voting by BDP supporters to help a rival nationalist party stop the AK winning more seats in the Elazig constituency.

The BDP is regularly accused of links to Kurdish militants fighting in a separatist insurgency.

The leader of the center-left main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) seized on the recording to attack what he called “a wiretapping government” and Erdogan.

“He knows about all the tapes. He knows about all of them, watches them before they’re released, then announces them to the public,” CHP chief Kemal Kilicdaroglu said during an election rally in Bartin, near the Black Sea, on Thursday.

“You are the prime minister. How can you face the people and tell them an illegal recording is being released?” he asked.

One of the BDP officials, whose voice was said to have been recorded, insisted there had been no such conversation and the tape was a fake created by intelligence agents working for Erdogan.

“We don’t know what to call this country now, a dictatorship, a rule of hypocrisy, or fraud? The prime minister orders the producing of fake documents, tapes,” Gultan Kisanak said on Kurdish channel Roj TV on Thursday evening.

The far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP) has accused the AK and its backers of using dirty tricks after the release last month of videos online showing MHP politicians in “sex videos” with women who were not their wives.

Erdogan denied that his party had anything to do with the scandal that forced the resignation of 10 MHP leaders.

While most of the electorate appear to like Erdogan’s blunt ways, foes accuse him of acting in an increasingly autocratic manner and fear his planned new constitution will perpetuate AK’s dominance.

Erdogan says the new charter will reflect democratic pluralistic values and make a clean break with the previous one, which was written in 1982 during one of several periods when the military held the whip hand over civilian politicians.

Turkey has suffered three coups since 1960, and in 1997 the military forced the resignation of a coalition government led by an Islamist party that Erdogan had belonged to.