With this election victory, Poland is smiling again – and that’s good for all of Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

The country's populist nightmare is almost over, but it's still early days and there are tough tasks ahead

To be in Poland on Sunday night was to experience a rare moment of political joy. Young voters queued until the early hours to see off the xenophobic, nationalist populists who have been dragging their country backwards; to prove that even an unfair election can be won against the odds; and to turn Poland towards a modern European future. If you were already in the queue at 9pm, when polls closed, you were allowed to wait to vote. Some of the queues were very long, so neighbours brought hot drinks to sustain people in the cold. Interviewed at about 1am on Monday, one young man in Wrocaw said he had to hang in there because this was the most important election since 1989.

I walked to a Warsaw polling station on election day with the same old friends whom I had accompanied to that historic vote on 4 June 1989. With delight, they each chose one name from the long list of parliamentary candidates. With equal delight, they refused even to take the ballot paper for the simultaneous referendum, which - with its ludicrously biased questions about things like an alleged forced relocation mechanism" for illegal immigrants, supposedly imposed by the European bureaucracy" - was effectively election propaganda for the ruling Law and Justice party (PiS). But my friends and I were full of nervous anticipation.

Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist