ROME  With signs reading “Enough!” and “We want a country that respects women,” thousands took to the streets across Italy on Sunday in coordinated demonstrations against Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, but their outpouring of frustration did not look poised to bring about political change.

The demonstrations  called “If not now, when?” after a Primo Levi book about the Holocaust  captured the frustration of Italians angered at the role of women in Mr. Berlusconi’s Italy, as well as a deep pessimism about the future and what they see as a growing divide between the country’s ills and the government’s concerns.

“We’re not happy to be a second-rate country or an ugly television soap opera,” Susanna Camusso, the leader of the Italian General Confederation of Labor, Italy’s largest labor union, said to rousing applause here in Piazza del Popolo, which was packed to the breaking point.

“We want a country in which it’s possible for women to live in dignity,” Ms. Camusso said, adding that a country that did not sustain women’s “capacity for growth” was “a country that goes backward.”