ROME — The results of local runoff elections across Italy are being widely analyzed not as a measure of what Italians want, but what they no longer care for.

The conservative political parties that governed Italy until November found their support waning throughout the country, and an upstart political movement that campaigned by lambasting the political elite took one major northern city, Parma, as well as several smaller ones in voting Sunday and Monday.

But the most analyzed number to emerge from the elections, held in 941 cities, was the low turnout: 51.3 percent.

“Never like now have Italians placed under indictment an ailing political system that resists any attempt at reform,” the political commentator Stefano Folli wrote Tuesday in a front page essay in the economic daily Il Sole 24 Ore. “If we add the abstentions to the protest vote, which was variously expressed, we have a system that is partially delegitimized.”