Nasry Asfura declared winner of Honduran presidential election after weeks of counting
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Former Trump-backed candidate Nasry Asfura won Honduras’ presidential election, election authorities said Wednesday afternoon, ending a weeks-long contest that has eroded the credibility of the Central American nation’s fragile electoral system.
The election continues to swing to the right in Latin America, coming a week after Chile elected right-wing politician Jose Antonio Kast as its next president.
Asfura, of the conservative National Party, received 40.27 percent of the vote on November 30, beating four-time candidate Salvador Nasralla of the centrist Liberal Party, who finished with 39.53 votes.
Asfura, the former mayor of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, won his second bid for the presidency, after he and Nasralla went neck-and-neck during a weeks-long vote count that fueled international concern.
On Tuesday night, a number of election officials and candidates were fighting over the results of the election. Meanwhile, supporters at the Asfura campaign headquarters burst into applause.
“Honduras: I am determined to govern,” Asfura wrote on the X website shortly after the results were released. “I will not disappoint you.”
The results were a rebuke to the current leftist leader, and his ruling democratic party Liberty and Re-foundation Party, known as LIBRE, who finished a distant third with 19.19 percent of the vote.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on Wednesday, writing in X: “The people of Honduras have spoken… [The Trump administration] he looks forward to working with his administration to promote prosperity and security in our region.”
A number of leading right-wing leaders across Latin America, including Trump ally Argentine President Javier Milei, also congratulated the politician.
Trump approves Asfura just days before the vote
Asfura ran as a smart politician, targeting his favorite infrastructure projects in the capital. Trump endorsed the 67-year-old activist days before the vote, saying he was the only Honduran candidate the US administration would work with.
Nasralla insisted that the election was fraudulent and asked for a recount of all votes a few hours before the official results were announced.
On Tuesday night, he spoke to Trump on the X channel, writing, “Mr. President, your nominee in Honduras is complicit in silencing the votes of our citizens. If he really deserves your support, if his hands are clean, if he has no fear, then why doesn’t he allow all the votes to be counted?”
He and other opponents of Asfura have maintained that Trump’s last-minute endorsement was an act of election interference that ultimately changed the results of the vote.
The unexpectedly chaotic election was also marred by a slow vote count, fueling further suspicions.
The Central American nation was stuck in a standoff for more than three weeks as vote counting by electoral authorities slowed, and at one point was paralyzed after a special count of final vote tallies, prompting warnings from international leaders.
Before the announcement, the Secretary General of the Organization of American States Albert Rambin on Monday made an “urgent request” to the Honduran authorities to close the special counting of the final votes before the deadline of Dec. 30. The Trump administration has warned that any attempts to prevent or delay the election count will be met with “consequences.”
For the incumbent, progressive President Xiomara Castro, the election marked a political reckoning. He was elected in 2021 on a promise to reduce violence and eradicate corruption.
He was among a group of progressive leaders in Latin America who were elected on a message of hope for change five years ago but have now been ousted after failing to deliver on their vision. Castro said last week he would accept the election results even after he said Trump’s actions in the election amounted to “an electoral coup.”
But Eric Olson, an independent international observer of Honduran elections with the Seattle International Foundation, and other observers said the rejection of Castro and his party was so clear that they had little room to challenge the results.
“Very few people, even within LIBRE, believe that they won the election. They will not say that there was fraud, that there was intervention by Donald Trump, that we should cancel the election and vote again,” said Olson. “But they don’t say, ‘We won the election.’ It’s clear they didn’t.”
