Silvio Berlusconi, who dominated Italian politics for much of the past three decades, died today, age 86. A figure who seemed peculiar, even bizarre, in his prime has come to look more and more familiar as others, Donald Trump included, emulated his populist approach to politics.

Berlusconi, a media mogul, used his billions to buy huge political influence. He had an uncanny knack for using the medium of television to transform his country’s culture. He was notorious for a string of sordid sexual affairs, faced prosecution for multiple alleged crimes, and weakened the rule of law by failing to respect constitutional limits on his power. More than anything else, he succeeded in personalizing political conflict until the whole country seemed to be split down the middle between his supporters and his opponents.

[Read: Berlusconi was Trump before Trump]

Berlusconi first entered Italian politics in the aftermath of a major corruption scandal in the early 1990s that pulverized the country’s established political parties. At first, foreign observers regarded him with a mix of concern and mild bemusement: With his macho demeanor and his sexist jokes, his past as a cruise crooner and his reputation as an inveterate womanizer, Berlusconi seemed an anachronistic character—one from an 18th-century opera buffa who had somehow teleported himself to the late 20th century and was now practicing an extended work of performance art.

For the first decade of his political rise, international coverage of Berlusconi tended to regard him as a figure both backward and specifically Italian. The idea that he might be a harbinger of political developments in their own country never seemed to occur to the correspondents who filed entertaining dispatches about his latest outrages to Le Monde or The New York Times.

In fact, despite the influence of the past in Italy and the ways in which its culture can seem old-fashioned, the country has a long record of anticipating the political future. The city-states of medieval Italy acted as a crucial bridge between the republican traditions of the ancient world and the new attempts at collective self-government pioneered in Britain’s North American colonies in the late 18th century. In the early 20th century, the vitriolic speeches of Benito Mussolini—which also seemed at first borrowed from the commedia—were a key inspiration to even more dangerous imitators in Germany and beyond. Italy again proved to be an unexpected laboratory of politics with Berlusconi’s rise.

[Yascha Mounk: The more you watch, the more you vote populist]

Berlusconi rode to power by exploiting a backlash against real institutional shortcomings. His enemies consistently underestimated him because of his crassness, and drove voters into his arms by making all too evident their disdain for his supporters. He masterfully made political conflicts all about him and turned judicial proceedings to his advantage by casting himself as a martyr, likening himself to Jesus Christ. Although he consistently failed to deliver on his promises to reverse economic stagnation and political decline, he was able to retain the loyalty of a large segment of the population and dominate Italian politics for two decades.

Berlusconi’s greatest triumph is not that he became prime minister of Italy on three occasions; or that he was a senator when he died; or that he remained a free man and one of the richest people in the country despite all the prosecutions—and convictions. It is that he was the principal founder of a tradition of demagogic politics that has defined the modern era in some of the world’s largest democracies, including Turkey, Brazil, India, and even the United States.

In his final years, Berlusconi’s influence did start to fade. His last stint as prime minister came to an end when his mismanagement of the country’s public finances, and the markets’ lack of trust in his ability to implement reforms, cost him majority support in Parliament. His party, Forza Italia—cannily named after Italian soccer fans’ chant for their national team—steadily shrank; it held 47 percent of the vote in 2008 but only 8 percent in 2022.

That is the good news: Even larger-than-life populists can eventually lose their hold over a political system. By the time he died, Berlusconi was the leader of a minor coalition partner in a government that mostly responded to his intemperate demands with condescending smiles.

But there is also bad news: The demise of populists like Berlusconi rarely turns out to be the salvation for which their detractors long. Berlusconi’s corrosive influence on the Italian political system is evident, and his departure will likely do little to heal its divisions.

[Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Welcome to the age of lawless masculinity]

The two remaining leaders of Italy’s far right, Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, may have fewer conflicts of interest or personal reasons to favor a weak judiciary. But they also have a much greater ideological commitment to the hard right—and a deeper admiration for leaders such as Viktor Orbán and (in Salvini’s case) Vladimir Putin. And that is part of a wider trend.

Berlusconi demonstrated that institutional guardrails are, even in supposedly consolidated democracies, much weaker than politicians and political scientists had assumed. The threat he embodied was in his example; he himself remained a deeply personalist politician, who relied on his charisma and cared mostly about his own interests. Berlusconi’s successors are just as willing to bend the rules or exploit their image, but for purposes that could do much more severe damage.