Asfura wins Honduras election
Trump-backed candidate Nasry Asfura won Honduras’ presidential election, the country’s electoral authorities said on Wednesday afternoon, ending a weeks-long count that has whittled away at the credibility of the Central American nation’s fragile electoral system. The election is continuing Latin America’s swing to the right, coming just a week after Chile chose the far-right politician José Antonio as its next president. Asfura, of the conservative National Party, received 40.27 per cent of the vote in the Novermber 30 election, Salvador of the conservative Liberal Party, who finished with 39.39 per cent of the vote.
Asfura, the ex-mayor of Tegucigalpa, won in his second bid for the presidency, after he and Nasralla were neck-and-neck during vote count that fueled international concern. On Tuesday night, a number of electoral officials and candidates were already fighting and contesting the results of the election. Meanwhile, followers in Asfura’s campaign headquarters erupted into cheers. “Honduras: I am prepared to govern,” wrote Asfura in a post on X shortly after the results were released. “I will not let you down.”
The results were a rebuke of the current leftist leader, and her governing democratic socialist Liberty and Re-foundation Party, known as LIBRE, whose candidate finished in a distant third place with 19.19 per cent of the vote. Asfura ran as a pragmatic politician, pointing to his popular infrastructure projects in the capital. Trump endorsed the 67-year-old conservative just days before the vote, saying he was the only Honduran candidate the US administration would work with. Nasralla has maintained that the election was fraudulent and called for a recount of all the votes just hours before the official results were announced.
On Tuesday night, he addressed Trump in a post on X, writing: “Mr. President, your endorsed candidate in Honduras is complicit in silencing the votes of our citizens. If he is truly worthy of your backing, if his hands are clean, if he has nothing to fear, then why doesn’t he allow for every vote to be counted?” He and other opponents of Asfura have maintained that Trump’s last-minute endorsement was an act of electoral interference that ultimately swung the results of the vote. The unexpectedly tumultuous election was also marred by a sluggish vote count, which fuelled even more accusations.
The Central American nation was stuck in limbo for more than three weeks as vote counting by electoral authorities lagged, and at one point was paralysed after a special count of final vote tallies was called, fueling warnings by international leaders. Ahead of the announcement, Organization of American States Secretary General Albert Ramdin on Monday made an “urgent call” to Honduran authorities to wrap up a special count of the final votes before a deadline of Dec 30. The Trump administration warned that any attempts to obstruct or delay the electoral count would be met with “consequences.”
For the incumbent, progressive President Xiomara Castro, the election marked a political reckoning. She was elected in 2021 on a promise to reduce violence and root out corruption. She was among a group of progressive leaders in Latin America who were elected on a hopeful message of change around five years ago, but are now being cast out after failing to deliver on their vision. Castro said last week that she would accept the results of the elections even after she claimed that Trump’s actions in the election amounted to an “electoral coup.”
But Eric Olson, an independent international observer during the Honduran election with the Seattle International Foundation, and other observers said that the rejection of Castro and her party was so definitive that they had little room to contest the results. “Very few people, even within LIBRE, believe they won the election. What they will say is there’s been fraud, that there has been intervention by Donald Trump, that we we should tear up the elections and vote again,” Olson said. “But they’re not saying we won the elections.
