The beginning of a new chapter in the relations between Ankara and Cairo.
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi visited Turkey today for the first time after 12 years of breaking relations. Sisi went to Türkiye to participate in the first meeting of the High Council for Strategic Cooperation of the Parties. This meeting, which will be held with the presence of the ministers of the two countries, seeks to implement the provisions of the agreements, which are referred to as a road map for the development of political and economic relations.
Erdogan went to the airport to welcome
Sisi’s visit to Turkey is of great importance because this is the first visit of an Egyptian official to Turkey at the presidential level after 12 years, and since Sisi visited Erdogan to open a new page in Turkish-Egyptian relations, new agreements Both countries have strategic importance.
Contrary to the usual process where heads of state and officials are welcomed in the presidential palace, Erdogan left no stone unturned for Sisi and personally welcomed Egyptian President Sisi at the Ankara airport. Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan was also present at the welcoming ceremony. Fidan, who is now at the head of Turkey’s diplomatic apparatus, during his tenure as head of Turkey’s Met Intelligence Service, with a team of 3 people, tried for two years to normalize relations between Ankara and Cairo, and the Emir of Qatar also during the holding of the World Cup football matches. had arranged a preliminary meeting between Erdoğan and the politician.
The end of the activities of the Egyptian Brotherhood in Türkiye
In the past few years, Turkey has made important changes in its foreign policy and has put the process of normalizing relations with the Zionist regime as well as normalizing relations with the UAE, Greece, Armenia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Egypt on the agenda. But in the meantime, the relationship with Egypt is more important. Because Turkey had already tried to seriously support the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia, and some other African countries during the political uprisings of the Arab countries and bring them to power.
Turkish-Egyptian relations deteriorated when, during the internal disputes in Egypt, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan fully supported the government of Mohamed Morsi, and after Sisi took power Morsi and his companions were imprisoned. In all his public speeches, Erdogan considered Sisi as a dictator and a coup plotter. But now the page has turned and Turkey tried to rekindle the relationship with Egypt in a relatively long period, nearly three years.
In the initial negotiations between the representatives of the intelligence services of the parties, the Egyptians asked Turkey to prohibit the continuation of several media groups critical of Sisi in Turkey to prove good faith. Turkey also accepted this request and it happened that several media groups, including a TV channel and several news sites belonging to Muslim Brotherhood activists in Turkey, were banned from continuing their work, and many of them left Turkey for other countries to continue their activities. they chose
Murad Yetkin, one of Turkey’s famous political analysts, said about the new chapter of Ankara-Cairo relations: “We are witnessing that Ankara has changed the direction of foreign policy with rapid turns because the previous harsh positions had damaged our relations with other countries. ».
Yetkin further challenged Erdogan’s political approach to developments in Egypt and Libya and said: “The Middle East policy that Erdogan pursued from 2011 to 2021 caused the failure of Turkey’s foreign policy. During the Libyan crisis, Turkey practically behaved in a way that was kept out of the game. But if relations with Egypt were not cut off, perhaps all these difficulties would not have occurred. Although Türkiye did not suffer losses in the 2021-2019 Libya crisis, it could not benefit as much as Egypt. In that case, Egypt, along with Russia, France, UAE, and Greece, was practically against Turkey. It was in the light of the same policies that Egypt managed to establish the largest natural gas liquefaction (LNG) facility with the investment of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.
Türkiye’s economic motives
In all the years when official and diplomatic relations between Turkey and Egypt were frozen, businessmen and economic activists were still doing their work and commercial exchanges between the markets of these two countries continued. The volume of trade between Turkey and Egypt is close to 10 billion dollars and the evidence shows that it is not difficult to achieve the target of 15 billion dollars. Mustafa Denizer, head of the Foreign Economic Relations Board of Turkey and Egypt, pointed out that “Egypt is Turkey’s most important African trading partner, and Algeria and Morocco are in the second and third ranks of Turkey’s goals.” Access to North Africa through Egypt and from there to the whole of Africa is very easy, and the activists of the export sector in Turkey are focused on the country.