March 18 () –
Turkey and Egypt are preparing a formal meeting between their respective leaders, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdelfatá al Sisi, in a new step in the normalization of relations broken in 2013 after the military coup against the Egyptian Islamist president Mohamed Mursi.
Erdogan and Al Sisi already met briefly in November last year during the opening of the World Cup in Qatar, as the two countries began to restore their commercial ties.
Until then, both leaders had kept a wide distance after Erdogan harshly criticized the Egyptian president for leading the coup against his Islamist predecessor, who ended up dying in jail in 2019, in what the Turkish leader described as a “blow to democracy.” “.
Now, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, announced this Saturday from Cairo — in the first visit by a minister of his caliber since then — that both countries “are working to facilitate a meeting between the two heads of state.” on a date “to be agreed” that could take place before or after the Turkish presidential election on May 14.
For the rest, his Egyptian counterpart, Samé Shukri, has described the talks this Saturday as “deep, frank and transparent”, as he appreciated in the subsequent press conference collected by the Egyptian newspaper ‘Al Ahram’, in which he reiterated the will of both countries to “normalize relations after the events of recent years”.
Shukri assured that “relations between the two countries are not broken” and recalled that there are diplomatic contacts at the level of business managers, although there is still no date for the restoration of relations at the ambassadorial level.
“We will deal with this matter in due course, and as this course we have adopted bears fruit,” the Egyptian minister declared.
