Turkey and Egypt reopen embassies for the first time since 2013
Almost ten years ago, President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi, then a general in the Egyptian army, overthrew the country's first democratically elected president. Elected in 2012, Mohamed Morsi belonged to the Freedom and Justice Party, a formation linked to the Muslim Brotherhood and supported by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AKP). Following Morsi's ouster and Turkish criticism of the new Egyptian government, the then Turkish ambassador, Hüseyin Avni Botsali, was declared persona non grata and forced to leave the country. In this context, Turkish-Egyptian relations deteriorated over the next ten years.
On 4 July 2023, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdel Fatah al-Sissi announced the reopening of their embassies in Cairo and Ankara and appointed their new ambassadors Salih Mutlu Sen and Amr Elhamamy. According to Arab News, the aim of this move is to normalise relations between the two countries. The Saudi Foreign Ministry welcomed the move in a press release.
The change of government in Egypt during the Arab Spring in early 2010 was not the only issue on which the two countries clashed during this decade of tensions. In Libya, Turkey supported the UN-recognised Government of National Accord (GNA), while Egypt backed the Libyan National Army (LNA), controlled by General Khalifa Haftar. The LNA, which emerged in 2014 and promised to tackle 'terrorist' groups that had infiltrated Libya from the Sahel, was immediately taken seriously by Egypt, for whom the terrorist threat represents one of the main challenges facing the state.
Moreover, the signing of a pact between Turkey and the GNA on 27 November 2019 regarding sovereignty over Mediterranean maritime areas increased Turkish-Egyptian tensions. For several years, Ankara has been seeking a foothold in the Mediterranean region, which is believed to contain millions of barrels of oil and trillions of cubic metres of natural gas, in order to diversify its energy market.
Despite this dispute, the first signs of a thaw appeared in May 2021, when a Turkish delegation visited Cairo, and accelerated from 2022, when Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdel Fattah al-Sissi met at the World Cup in Qatar. Since then, President al-Sissi has made numerous phone calls to his Turkish counterpart. Last February, in the aftermath of the earthquake in Turkey and Syria, the Egyptian president gave his support to Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry also travelled to the affected regions in a message of solidarity, according to Arab News. Finally, Abdel Fattah al-Sissi was among the first leaders to congratulate Recep Tayyip Erdogan on his re-election in May 2023.
The reopening of the Turkish and Egyptian embassies marks the culmination of the normalisation process between the two states, whose bilateral relations should continue to develop.