Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan went far in his hostility towards Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi since the latter’s arrival to power after the revolution in June 2013, as he was the one who described his ascension to power as a bloody coup, and repeatedly stressed that he would not recognize his rule raising the Rabaa slogan repeatedly in support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Erdogan delegated Turkey as the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, and supported them in media and political platforms to attack Sisi’s rule.
He even sent hundreds of terrorists to the Egyptian Sinai and to the Libyan-Egyptian borders to carry out terrorist operations with the aim of destabilizing the government in Egypt.
He coordinated with Qatar, Libya’s Sarraj, and the Muslim Brotherhood leading massive campaigns against Sisi, and repeatedly said that there is no future for this rule, indicating that the Muslim Brotherhood will return to power after they were removed during the 2013 revolution.
Perhaps he thought at some point that, by agreeing with Sarraj in Libya, he succeeded in encircling Egypt from its Libyan side, and that he could move the Muslim Brotherhood from there into the Egyptian interior in order to open all regional paths to its expansion project.
After all this, we are now witnessing a Turkish courting of Egypt, as Erdogan has begun to speak the language of interests with Cairo, stressing the importance of the historical relationship between the Turkish and Egyptian peoples.
His Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, in a similar vein, calls for improving relations between the two countries, and says there are talks between them at the level of foreign ministers, although his Egyptian counterpart Sameh Shoukry denied this amid talks about discussions at the intelligence level between the two sides.
Yassin Aktay, a senior adviser to Erdogan and responsible for communication between Erdogan and the Egyptian opposition groups, said in an interview on September 12, “The Egyptian army is a great army, and we respect it very much, because it is the army of our brothers.”
Aktay said early that that the Egyptian army coup took Egypt back fifty years.
Moreover, Anadolu Agency, the mouthpiece for Turkey’s foreign policy, broadcasted a report criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and talked about its weaknesses and its exploitation of Egyptian people’s plight after 2013!
Perhaps whoever scrutinizes all these events would see himself as the leader of a group preparing for a change or a political coup against the hostile Turkish policy that was declared towards Egypt.
So, what happened to bring us to a Turkish political coup toward Egypt? What are the reasons and motives behind this? Does this constitute a real political shift in Ankara’s policy, or is it an attempt to limit the Turkish foreign policy crisis after Erdogan has implicated it in endless wars and conflicts?
Can we really witness a new chapter in Egyptian-Turkish relations during the era of Sisi and Erdogan? Under what conditions can this page be opened? Is the Egyptian side ready for that after Erdogan was so hostile?
In fact, Erdogan’s past experiences have proven that the only constant he has is power, and in order to stay in it, he is ready to do everything, even if it means him turning on himself. Consequently, he is ready to ally with any party and turn against it together, and the opposite is quite possible in his practice for politics and power.
He allied with the preacher Fethullah Gulen, and used to describe him as an older brother before he turned against him, describing him as a terrorist involved in the alleged coup attempt in 2016.
He also sent Hakan Fidan, the Head of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization, to Imrali prison for dialogue with the leader of Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Abdullah Ocalan.
He also sent delegates to the PKK’s headquarters in Qandil to discuss the possibility of reaching a peace agreement before abandoning this strategy. He denies the existence of a Kurdish issue, and accused everyone who defended it of being terrorists.
It is necessary to try to understand the reasons for his flirtation with Egypt and its leadership, and perhaps the most important reasons are:
1. Erdogan has reached a complete conviction that the overthrow of the government in Egypt through the support of Muslim Brotherhood has reached a dead end, and that the Muslim Brotherhood has become a scourge for him. In his calculations, pursuing this strategy would cost him too much.
2. The regional policies of Sisi, by relying on joint regional policies with the Arab Gulf states, following a moderate policy towards the Syrian crisis and the situation in Iraq, and by pursuing a deliberate and well-thought out policy in Libya, especially after his red lines in Sirte and Jufrah, thwarted Erdogan’s policies, which forced him to face very difficult choices, especially in Libya.
3. The regional policy pursued by Sisi regarding energy resources in the Mediterranean, and his success in forging alliances with Greece and Cyprus, cooperation with Israel and Europe, and the establishment of a Mediterranean gas forum without Turkey’s involvement, prompted Erdogan to practice a reckless policy that put him in conflict with Europe, a policy that created new lineups, led to the isolation of Turkey and its isolation.
4. Erdogan, after his sense of loss and fear of interior repercussions, now looks at Egypt and its regional role in a different way; he has come to view it as an important country in searching for a way out of his crisis.
Based on these and some other reasons, Erdogan began directly and through his government staff to court Egypt, sometimes by emphasizing the historical and civilizational relations with it by saying that Egypt is closer to Turkey than Greece, and that Turkey is keen on Egypt’s interests.
It expresses its willingness to take action against the Muslim Brotherhood groups, so here many activists talk about a Turkish role in the matter of the arrest of the great Brotherhood leader Mahmoud Ezzat in the center of Cairo.
Without a doubt, Erdogan has put himself in an embarrassing position, but what adds to his embarrassment is not his messages to Egypt, but his blatant policies, which everyone knows are an expression of crisis an expression of a real political choice.
It is common knowledge that the Ottoman Turkish project is hostile to the Egyptian and Arab project, and that both projects do not meet, and therefore we can say that the Egyptian reconciliation with Turkey will not be with Erdogan’s Turkey and his Ottoman project, but with a different Turkey – a Turkey which is reconciling with itself and its neighborhood, a Turkey without colonial ambitions led by a Sultan who seeks out the defunct culture and stands on its ruins.