If there is one place on earth where the effects of the July 3 military coup in Egypt were felt as much as in Cairo by deposed president Mohammed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood, it must be Turkey.

As Ankara coped with the trauma of the events in Istanbul and most other parts of the country, the military coup in Egypt came as an additional tremor to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). It so shook Erdogan that he interrupted his much-needed holiday and returned to work, convening his top aides and within 48 hours launching a vigorous campaign of criticism against the West, especially Europe, for not acknowledging the Egyptian coup as a coup.

As Milliyet columnist and Al-Monitor writer Kadri Gursel said so incisively in his July 7 Milliyet column, “Turkish Islamists are living the Egyptian coup not as a coup in Egypt but as profoundly as a coup against themselves in Turkey.… They want those looking from outside to put them in the place of victimized Egyptian Islamists.”

The Egyptian military’s unseating of Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood also serves as a dose of palliative care that AKP rule needs badly given its own traumas, especially the Taksim-Gezi protests. Erdogan and his fellow party members have again, as Gursel noted, “retreated to the shelter of victimhood” and legality, two themes they voice persistently. The AKP has successfully employed the theme of “victimhood’ in its claim that it represents the “black Turks” against the “white Turks,” and its leaders always aver that to come to power through elections is the source of legitimacy for a political movement that has victimhood as its starting point.