Alcide De Gasperi's Christian Democracy weakened in this election, after that the exceptional conditions of 1948 had expired.

Communists and Socialists obtained more votes running divided than they did together five years before, absorbing most of the Republican electorate.

Even if the Communists obtained some seats in the agricultural south, the Socialists remarked their strength in the Milanese industrial neighbourhood.

The Italian Democratic Socialist Party obtained a seat in Milan, a city led by its mayor Virgilio Ferrari, while the rightist and anti-constitutional Italian Social Movement and the Monarchist National Party took away some Conservative votes from the Christian Democracy and obtained their first seats in the bourgeois centers of Milan and Como.

The electoral system introduced in 1948 for the newly elected Senate was a strange hybrid which established a form of proportional representation into FPTP-like constituencies.