Chileans
went to the polls for the second round of presidential elections today, and
elected left-wing former student leader Gabriel Boric. Which is great news, not only for the obvious reasons, but also because his opponent (and front-runner after the first round last month) was
José Antonio Kast, a homophobic racist who supports the Pinochet dictatorship and whose father was
an actual Nazi. If he'd won, it would likely have turned back the clock on the last decade of social and democratic progress (not to mention potentially have messed with the ongoing process of
reforming their Pinochet-era constitution to be more democratic). With Boric's election, Chile seems to have dodged that bullet.