Egypt and Turkey are intent on coordinating policy in Libya

On April 20, Egypt’s Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry visited his Turkish counterpart Hakan Fidan in Ankara to discuss a wide array of international and regional issues, including Libya.

For more than a decade, Egypt and Turkey were on opposite sides of the Libyan conflict, with Ankara offering security to Tripoli-based governments and Cairo establishing deep-rooted ties with the eastern-based Libyan National Army (LNA). The rivalry between the two capitals was not solely governed by realpolitik, but also had ideological undertones with Turkey supporting the Islamist-leaning Muslim Brotherhood, which has been banned in Egypt since 2013.

Following the end of the 2019-2020 war and political efforts to unify Libya’s executive authority, calculations slowly took a turn in Ankara with greater attention given to the economic and strategic potential of eastern Libya, which represented the bulk of Turkish contracts prior to the 2011 revolution. Regionally, the political failure of the Muslim Brotherhood also pushed Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan to adopt a more pragmatic approach, leading him to close a few channels of this movement in 2021. Additional signals by Turkey were made to resume ties with the bloc of Arab countries that have strongly opposed the Muslim Brotherhood, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.

In February 2024, Erdogan made a visit to Cairo, the first since 2012, which was made under very different circumstances as Egypt back then was governed by the Muslim Brotherhood. This visit demonstrated a massive shift in the usual politics that dominated the region for the last decade and opened the door for new fields of cooperation between Turkey and Egypt, notably in Libya. While the two countries may not have the same alliances and commitments in Libya, they no longer are interested in undermining each other's positions in the country and will seek to draw their foreign policy closer - notably because they both need to avert a downward trajectory for Libya in order to secure their economic interests.

Egyptian-Turkish rapprochement is an undeniable regional trend. It is believed that Egyptian President Abdelfattah al-Sisi will visit Turkey in May and Shoukry’s visit to Ankara is a prelude to that. During their meeting, the two foreign ministers agreed on pursuing a joint approach on Libya and to preserve security in the North African country. Despite years backing one side of the Libyan conflict, both Egypt and Turkey have now managed to more or less normalise relations across eastern and western Libya, hence their “total support for Libya’s unity.”