As a line of young Egyptian men moved in a celebratory conga through Cairo’s Tahrir Square at the weekend, a lone grey-robed woman stepped forward and started wagging her finger in disagreement.

She was annoyed because the men were shouting “the people want to leave the square” – as if Friday’s resignation of President Hosni Mubarak was sufficient to bring the country’s extraordinary popular uprising to an end.

The woman was having none of it. “We have been here for 17 days,” she cried above the noise of the men and their tambourine. “And we are not going to leave until our demands are met.”

Her scolding revealed what may prove to be an unexpected legacy of Mr Mubarak’s drawn-out – and at times brutal – efforts to cling to power. By refusing to step down, and thus making his opponents angrier, more numerous and more confident, this stubborn autocrat may paradoxically have improved the revolutionaries’ chances of forcing deeper change to a system he ran for almost 30 years.

The humiliating manner of his departure will also make life more uncomfortable for other leaders in the region who are now wondering if they may be next.

The moment of Mr Mubarak’s exit came suddenly, but the run-up to it after the first big street protest on January 25 was protracted and often nasty. Hundreds of demonstrators are believed to have been killed and others detained and tortured as the regime went on the offensive using rocks, tear gas and bullets.

Mr Mubarak’s three public speeches during the crisis were by turns arrogant, threatening and lacking in any sense of empathy. Having failed to learn from similar mistakes made by Tunisia’s President Zein al-Abidine Ben Ali, before he was ousted last month, the Egyptian head of state was condemned to repeat them.

A leader more attuned to the national interest – or possessing a more sophisticated sense of self-preservation – might have noticed the ominous patterns and reacted accordingly. As early as the protesters’ self-declared “day of anger” on January 28, there were many anecdotal indications that Mr Mubarak’s rule faced a broad-based and possibly existential threat.

The signs included the woman dropping bottles of water from an apartment window for tear-gassed protesters to wash out their streaming eyes; the watching thirtysomething government worker who said wistfully that he would have joined the protests if only his parents had let him; and the old woman who, calling plaintively from her barred flat that Mr Mubarak was a war hero, seemed a pathetic symbol of the president’s shrinking and ageing political constituency.

If Mr Mubarak had announced more changes then – including a handover of power and the abolition of repressive laws – some protesters and diplomats say it could have been enough. By clinging on, he has implicated senior figures in the regime, notably Omar Suleiman, his new vice-president, who might otherwise have expected – however contentiously – to have taken over and restored some stability to the existing order.

Mr Mubarak’s desperation has also damaged the credibility of the army, revealing it as an at best ambivalent institution that stuck to the letter of its pledge not to shoot at demonstrators while at important moments doing little to protect them from assault by government loyalists.

Mr Mubarak’s scorched earth departure leaves his country with an unusually open political space, with no obvious leaders yet emerging from an unhierarchical revolution whose supporters’ aims range from fundamental political change to the single goal of overthrowing the president.

That vacuum brings dangers as well as opportunities, but at least Egyptians have a chance at last to craft their own achievements and make their own mistakes.

As for other autocrats under threat in countries ranging from Algeria to Yemen, the more intelligent among them will now be watching closely for the kindred spirits among their own citizens of the woman who wagged her finger in Tahrir Square.