After a decade of disagreement, a new milestone in the Egypt-Turkey rapprochement
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu is expected in Egypt on Saturday, March 18, 2023. AP - Burhan Ozbilici
Text by: RFI Follow
1 min
The head of Turkish diplomacy, Mevlüt Cavusoglu, is expected in Egypt this Saturday, March 18. It might seem like a banal ministerial visit, but not at all: Egypt and Turkey are very gradually emerging from a decade of falling out, caused by the fall of Mohamed Morsi and the accession of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power.
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It was in Qatar, in the stands of a stadium at the time of the kick-off of the football World Cup, that the handshake took place at the end of 2022. Egyptian President Abel Fattah al-Sisi and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, announced their reconciliation after ten years of rupture.
In 2013, the military al-Sisi came to power in Egypt, bringing down President Mohamed Morsi, the only democratically elected head of state in the country's history. The late Mohamed Morsi was a Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational Islamist movement supported by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey.
Erdogan in Turkey, al-Sisi in Egypt: two authoritarian leaders, but whose visions diverge on many regional issues. Two presidents at the head of countries undermined by economic crises, but whose trade was maintained during the quarrel.
Their reconciliation is also part of vast diplomatic maneuvers underway, between the restoration of diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia and the rapprochement between Turkey and Bashar al-Assad's Syria.
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Read on on the same topics:
- Egypt
- Turkey
- Abdel Fattah al-Sisi
- Recep Tayyip Erdogan
- Diplomacy
- Mohamed Morsi
- Muslim Brotherhood