Il Sultanato
By Giovanni Sartori
Laterza €15,182 pages

Papi: Uno Scandalo Politico
By Peter Gomez, Marco Lillo and Marco Travaglio
Chiare Lettere €15, 331 pages

Silvio Berlusconi is no joke, risible as many foreigners find him. For Italians of the right, he is a staunch anti-socialist, possessing the ability to weld rightwing forces into a powerful majority that has increasingly pushed back the left. For them, his “private life” is either enviable or irrelevant or both.

For leftwing Italians, he is a source of frustration and shame: frustration that during the past 15 years in which he has made himself into a potent political force, the left has not succeeded in curbing his extraordinary hegemony over media and politics, and now they can’t lay a glove on him; shame – because of the fact that someone whom they see as so destructive of civil society, freedom of speech and even the rule of law should represent their country.

Giovanni Sartori, doyen of Italian political scientists and a columnist for Corriere della Sera, has come up with a word for Berlusconi’s particular form of rule. It is not, he says – in opposition to those who see a black shirt beneath the flawless suits – a dictatorship. Instead, it is a “Sultanate”, in which Berlusconi rules “over a paper party literally prostrate at his feet. He nominates whatever ministers he wants, fires whom he wants, as if they were his service staff.”

Add to that the prime minister’s ability to nominate whom he wishes as a member of parliament through party control of the electoral lists, as well as his tendency to promote beautiful young women irrespective of their professional and political (in)experience and (in)abilities, and you have, Sartori believes, a sultan’s court.

Sartori admits that Berlusconi’s aim to “weaken and dilute the countervailing powers which put obstacles in his way” could lead to tyranny – and he notes that his megalomania and his persecution complex are both growing. But, he believes, the prime minister isn’t that ambitious: “Berlusconi is simply interested in doing what he wants.”

Il Sultanato (“The Sultanate”) is a collection of Sartori’s columns from Corriere della Sera, with an essay or two thrown in – all in Italian. It has the inevitable disadvantage that the issues that commanded front pages when the columns were written have now faded. But the core of the book is a lucid attempt to define what is a unique regime – one in which soft media power is employed with ruthless persistence to smother all in a mist of jollity and optimism and machismo.

No one as clear-eyed as Sartori could fail to note that the Italian left has fumbled its chances; one reason, he writes, is that “on one side there’s always and only Berlusconi; on the other there’s Prodi, D’Alema, Amato, Rutelli, Veltroni, always jostling and in competition with each other”. It is wholly true that the left seems incapable of producing a leader who can command loyalty. The numerous political pages of the newspapers – right or left, pro- or anti-Berlusconi – are routinely filled with waspish interviews, or stories based on self-serving briefings by the leaders of the left. The sheer amount of space that Berlusconi can occupy – commanding as he does six of the seven main Italian TV channels – sucks the oxygen of publicity from all other forces, and concentrates political attention on him.

That attention, as another book, Papi, tells us, has been largely prurient for most of 2009. The book’s title comes from the name for Berlusconi used by Noemi Letizia, the 18-year-old Neapolitan would-be TV star whose association with the prime minister provoked an outburst from his wife. The term is an affectionate diminutive – “Daddy” or “Pops” – and it denotes a relationship that, whatever its true nature, must stand as unique in modern times for the leader of a state.

Berlusconi, as the book narrates, attended Noemi’s birthday party, held in a kitsch, garish hall on the periphery of Naples, the heart of that part of Italy occupied – it’s not too strong a word – by the vicious Camorra gangs evoked so vividly by Roberto Saviano in the film Gomorrah. The authors of Papi describe it: “On one side of the outer ring road here is abandoned rubbish, weeds and Nigerian prostitutes who put out their hands to every car that passes; on the other, the Villa Santa Chiara, a reception hall full of mirrors and white pillars which young Noemi Letizia, ‘Nemi’ to her friends, has chosen to celebrate her 18th birthday.”

What was the prime minister doing there? Among the various explanations offered were that Noemi’s father was an old friend; that Berlusconi wanted to discuss a candidate for his party for a local council; that the father had been the chauffeur of Bettino Craxi, the former prime minister who most advanced Berlusconi’s career. None proved to be true. Women have told of parties in Berlusconi’s various palaces and villas; one call girl claims she was procured by the prime minister’s fixers to spend the night with him; and there were claims – this more flattering than damaging – that he, for all his 72 years, could still give a girl a good time.

Travaglio is the most determined of the Berlusconi trackers – of whom there are many: Italy remains a democracy, even if under pressure. He uses this quickly written documentary to press home his case that Berlusconi’s goatishness is a long-term addiction – and more importantly, that he uses his media empire and political power to feed his sexual desires. Among the wealth of detail that Travaglio and his co-writers have assembled is the story of his relationship, starting in 2003, with TV presenter Virginia Sanjust, for whom he obtained a better post in RAI, the state broadcaster, and a lucrative consultancy with the prime minister’s office. Her divorced husband, a secret service agent, blackmailed Berlusconi into forcing through his promotion.

It is a shockingly clear example of Sartori’s comment that “Berlusconi is simply interested in doing what he wants”. The Sultan of Rome, above the law, impatient of constraint, fearing no opposition, has had a torrid spring and summer. When the new political season begins, we shall see how far he has been damaged and how possible it is that he will be replaced – either by the left, or, more likely, by one or other of his allies on the right. Unwise, at the moment, to bet on it.

John Lloyd is an FT contributing editor