If you have been following the Turkey Pulse of Al-Monitor you must know that Turkey’s ruling party Justice and Development Party (AKP) should be applauded for its resistance to any and every form of political opposition. One must give credit where credit is due, and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his crew deserve kudos for competing in every field, from fashion to media, with the "establishment," the "secular," "white Turks," whomever you would like to name — that is, anyone who is not an AKP partisan. 

There is, however, one field they have yet to conquer: Satire. AKP cannot compete with political cartoons. Indeed, my 10-year-old son brought this fact to my attention by saying, "Who are the pro-AKP caricaturists?" There was only one name that came to my mind: Salih Memecan, whose wife is a longtime MP from AKP. Considering that I might be biased, I asked a close friend, who is an official member of AKP, to do a survey. She reviewed humor magazines on sale for November and came back saying, "It is disgraceful. These are all Islamophobic AKP-haters."

Surely, many Turkish artists are pro-AKP as Nagehan Alci has highlighted in her piece, where her focus was on an openly gay artist who was delighted to see hijabi Turks befriending members of the LGBT community. Alci’s piece encouraged me to expand my field research for diverse caricaturists. I failed to find an Erdogan-admiring gay cartoonist. My findings point to a bleak picture. I write to be proven wrong. 

Political cartoons as a form of graphic protest still have an effect on the body politics of Turkey. Even those who may not understand Turkish can see the message in a caricature. Cartoons make us not only smile, but promptly locate the undeniable truth in our minds. Erdogan is aware of this power, hence there is a Wikipedia entry in Turkish, "Cartoons sued by Erdogan."