The head of Turkish diplomacy, Mevlüt Cavusoglu, is expected in Egypt this Saturday, March 18. It might look like an ordinary ministerial visit, but not at all: Egypt and Turkey are emerging very gradually from a decade of estrangement, caused by the fall of Mohamed Morsi and the accession of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi to power. .
It was in Qatar, in the stands of a stadium at the start of the FIFA World Cup, that the handshake took place at the end of 2022. Egyptian President Abel Fattah al-Sissi and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, showed their reconciliation, after ten years of rupture.
In 2013, the military al-Sissi came to power in Egypt, bringing down the president Mohammad Mursi, the only democratically elected head of state in the country’s history. The late Mohamed Morsi was a muslim brothera transnational Islamist movement backed by Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.
Erdogan in Turkey, al-Sissi 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 estrangement.
Their reconciliation is also part of the vast diplomatic maneuvers underway, between the restoration of Iran-Saudi Arabia diplomatic relations and the step-by-step rapprochement between Turkey and Bashar al-Assad’s Syria.