Trump’s nominee has been declared the winner of the Honduran presidential vote

Trump-backed Honduran presidential candidate Nasry Asfura has won the Honduran presidential election, the country’s election authorities said Wednesday afternoon, ending a weeks-long tally.

The election result continued to swing to the right in parts of Latin America, just a week after Chile elected politician José Antonio Kast as its next president.

Asfura, of the conservative National Party, received 40.27% of the vote on November 30, edging out four-time candidate Salvador Nasralla of the conservative Liberal Party, who finished with 39.39% of the vote.

Asfura won his second presidential bid, after he and Nasralla neck and neck during a lengthy vote count that sparked international concern over the Central American nation’s fragile electoral system.

On Tuesday night, a number of election officials and candidates were already fighting and disputing the results of the election. Meanwhile, supporters at the Asfura campaign headquarters burst into applause.

“Honduras: I am determined to govern,” wrote Asfura, the former mayor of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, in a post on X 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, in the election which finished a distant third with 19.19% of the vote.

Asfura ran as a smart politician, targeting his favorite infrastructure projects in the capital. President Trump endorsed the 67-year-old striker days before the vote, saying he was the only Honduran candidate the US administration would work with.

“If he does not win, the United States will not throw good money after bad, because the wrong Leader can bring disastrous results to the country, regardless of which country,” wrote Mr.

At the end of last month, Mr. Trump too you are forgiven former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez – a member of the National Party – for drug and arms trafficking charges, allowing him to leave US prison. The US president said Hernandez was “treated harshly and unfairly,” but his decision drew criticism from members of both parties.

Nasralla accused the election of fraud and called for a recount of all votes just hours before the official results were announced.

On Tuesday night, he spoke with Mr. Trump on the website X, writing: “Mr. President, the candidate in Honduras is involved 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 does he not allow all the votes to be counted?”

He and other opponents of Asfura have maintained that the approval of Mr.

The unexpectedly chaotic election was also marred by a slow vote count, fueling further suspicions.

The Central American nation was stuck in a quagmire for more than three weeks as vote counting by electoral authorities slowed, and at one point was paralyzed after a special count of the final vote count, 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 that he would accept the results of the election even after the actions of Mr.

But Eric Olson, an independent international observer of the 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 dispute 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.”