Egypt, Morsi, MB Strategic Loss For Erdogan and Davutoglu

Turkish Government believe that the military coup that toppled Egyptian President Morsi was also against them, or they are trying hard to give that impression to outside observers. It really doesn’t make a difference which scenario is correct since it is all about a perception of feelings. Both produce the same results.

The Egyptian military coup that overthrew Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi is a blow to Turkey’s regional strategy under the AKP government.

There’s no doubt that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) rulers wanted to share the victimhood of the Egyptian Muslim(Mufsid) Brotherhood. Victimization is something that Turkish Islamists badly need to exploit nowadays.
Their first reaction to the societal explosion of Gezi Park in Istanbul, which the government provoked with police violence, was to craft the perception that this was an international plot against the AKP government. They painted themselves as the victims in an attempt to delegitimize the protests. No doubt victimhood was a deterrent against those who wanted to debate the deeds and mistakes of those presumed to be have been victimized.

The government of Turkey has suffered a major loss with the recentdevelopments in Egypt. Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood government were strategic partners of Turkey’s AKP in terms of economic and political relations.
That wasn’t all the soft power Turkey transmitted to the Brotherhood’s Egypt. With an October 2012 agreement, Turkey extended a $1 billion, five-year credit to Egypt that did not require repayment for the first three years. Turkey’s granting this $1 billion credit, just as Egypt was struggling to obtain a $4.8 billion credit from the International Monetary Fund, indicated the importance that Turkey placed on Egypt.
Not only that: Egypt, with its Muslim Brotherhood government, was the most important element of a “new order” that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu was claiming to spearhead in the Middle East. This is why we have to say that the developments in Egypt truly had an earthquake effect on the AKP government.
Prime Minister Erdogan interrupted his summer holiday and immediately returned to Istanbul to hold an emergency meeting with cabinet ministers to assess the coup.
The list of senior officials that attended that meeting show the importance attached to the Egyptian crisis: Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, EU minister Egemen Bagis, Minister of Culture and Tourism Omer Celik, AKP spokesman Huseyin Celik, Deputy Chairman of AKP Mevlut Cavusoglu, Prime Minister’s senior adviser Yalcin Akdogan and the Undersecretary of National Intelligence Organization Hakan Fidan.
As a result of the coup, Erdogan has indefinitely postponed his scheduled July 5 visit to Gaza. Since the eruption of the Gezi Park protests, Erdogan has not been as pro-active in his politics and a vital determinant of the agenda of his country as before. The Turkish prime minister, instead of steering the developments in his country, is in a reactive position and wants to free himself from that position.
To restore his position affected by nationwide protests directly targeting himself he was intending to stage a classic pro-Hamas move that would be designed for local political consumption.
Erdogan must have been feeling such heavy pressure that he reneged on the accord he had reached with President Barack Obama in their White House mid-May meeting that if he were to go Gaza, then he would stop by at Ramallah.
During Erdogan’s September 2011 tour of Arab Spring countries like Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, he recommended secularism at each stop. Nobody listened to his well-placed suggestions in Egypt. He didn’t make that recommendation a part of his political narrative and he did not abide by his own advice in his own country.

In a nutshell, this is a summary of what happened in Egypt and Turkey: The so- called Islamic references of AKP and the Brotherhood were not enough to govern their countries’ vastly complex and diverse societies. They had to make use of foreign references that were alien to their political cultures, such as pluralism and participation.