Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Turkish media Sunday that he still considers the ousted Mohammed Morsi to be Egypt’s leader:

“Currently, my president in Egypt is Morsi because he was elected by the people,” he told the pro-government Today’s Zaman. “If we don’t judge the situation like that it is tantamount to ignoring the Egyptian people,” he added.

Erdogan was an early and consistent supporter of Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood-linked government, and Ankara reacted to Morsi’s removal with outrage. Cairo had already summoned the Turkish ambassador to Egypt last week after Ankara described Morsi’s removal as an “unacceptable coup.”

The decline of the Brotherhood’s political prospects in Egypt has been taken by observers as a severe blow to efforts by Erdogan’s Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) to establish regional influence and serve as a model for what had been hailed – in some corners of the foreign policy community – as a new model for democratic Islamism.

[Photo: Jonathan Rashad / Flickr]