For all of the bad news in the world right now and there's a lot of it the results of Poland's parliamentary elections over the weekend were really good news for democracy.

Poland won. Democracy has won. We have removed them from power.

Donald Tusk is the head of the opposition which got enough votes to prevent the ruling law and justice party from continuing to rule.

This is one of the most beautiful days of Poland's democracy and I have no doubt that this day will go down in our history as a day that opens a new era and the rebirth of our republic.

Law and justice is a nationalist populist party with authoritarian tendencies and it's undermined Poland's democratic institutions since coming to power in 2015.

Many people expected it to keep doing that.

But these election results indicate that Polish voters have had enough.

Coming up on today explained what this all means for Poland and for the rest of Europe.

It's today explained I'm Noel King, Vox's senior foreign correspondent Jen Kirby traveled to Warsaw for the Polish elections.

Now these were elections that many people in Poland and outside of Poland said were the most important in a generation.

The line that I heard over and over again was that this was the most important election since 1989 when Poland had its first partly free election in the aftermath of communism.

The current ruling party which is a conservative right wing populist party called the law and justice party or peace that's the acronym, PIS.

They have been in power for eight years and in that time they have overseen the undermining of the rule of law and democratic institutions in Poland.

Since the last eight years what's happened was destroying the democracy and nowadays democracies are dying silently.

So we don't need tanks on the street to see it and that's why it's very dangerous.

They've entrenched themselves most notably in new judiciary, putting in judges who would be favorable to their perspectives and point of use.

They've also taken control of public media and really made it a mouthpiece of the state.

And they've done other things in terms of capturing state institutions that have really consolidated their power.

And so Poland has been on this pathway to having an liberal democracy and a lot of people felt if the law and justice party won another term that that would be the end.

That there would be no going back that the next time the opposition wouldn't even have a shot because the party in power would skew the field so heavily that that would be the end.

You went around Warsaw talking to people in addition to some of them saying we are concerned about the fate of our democracy.

What were the issues?

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