Turkey faces rough road to normalization with Egypt

Turkey’s reconciliation with Egypt is not likely to be easy, but progress after the first high-level meeting between the two sides could mark a new course in Ankara’s foreign policy and pave the way for its reconciliation with the Gulf heavyweights as well.

Fehim Tastekin
Fehim Tastekin
May 7, 2021
Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal (C) and his delegation meet with their Egyptian counterparts in the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Egypt's capital, Cairo, on May 5, 2021. Turkey and Egypt have begun slowly warming ties as they vie for regional primacy a decade after the Arab Spring, but analysts say deep-seated mistrust means full normalization will take time. The talks come nearly two months after Ankara established the first diplomatic contacts with Cairo since 2013 as part of wider efforts t
Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal (C) and his delegation meet with their Egyptian counterparts in the Foreign Ministry headquarters in Egypt's capital, Cairo, on May 5, 2021. Turkey and Egypt have begun slowly warming ties as they vie for regional primacy a decade after the Arab Spring, but analysts say deep-seated mistrust means full normalization will take time. The talks come nearly two months after Ankara established the first diplomatic contacts with Cairo since 2013 as part of wider efforts to mend fences with Middle Eastern rivals. — KHALED DESOUKI/AFP via Getty Images

Turkey’s quest for fence-mending with Egypt led to the first high-level bilateral talks on the issue May 5, but Ankara could hardly hope for easy progress as normalization with Egypt depends closely on broader changes in Turkey’s regional policies.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan — well aware that Egypt’s terms for normalization reflect also the expectations of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — phoned the Saudi king on the eve of the Turkish-Egyptian talks in Cairo. According to the state-run Anatolia news agency, Erdogan extended his good wishes “on the occasion of Qadr Night, to be marked this week, and the approaching Eid al-Fitr holiday” — never mind that the feast was more than a week away.

Tellingly, Erdogan has kept mum on a Saudi decision to close Turkish schools in the kingdom, which flew in the face of a good-will message from Ankara only days before. In a marked change of tone, a senior Erdogan aide had asserted April 26 that Turkey respected the way the Saudi judiciary handled the 2018 murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul and was seeking “a more positive agenda” with Saudi Arabia to repair ties.

Similarly, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu had phoned his Egyptian counterpart, Sameh Shoukry, April 10 to extend his good wishes over the start of the holy month of Ramadan — a conversation that paved the way for the May 5-6 talks in Cairo, which marked the elevation of bilateral dialogue to the level of foreign ministries from the hitherto level of intelligence officers. At the meeting, chaired by the Egyptian and Turkish deputy foreign ministers, the two sides laid out their priorities for what is expected to be a road map defining the areas of cooperation on which Ankara and Cairo will focus.

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