Lack of electoral results plunges Honduras into political chaos and uncertainty

Honduras is plunged into political chaos after nearly 15 days of a presidential election whose results remain undefined. Electoral authorities will begin on Saturday the special examination of 2,773 files with inconsistencies, a process that could last several days, but which will define the winner of an election marked by delay and clumsiness in the counting of votes, allegations of fraud, the call for the mobilization of its bases of the official party, which does not recognize its resounding defeat, and the criticism of President Xiomara Castro on the brazen intervention of Donald Trump. The American gave his support to conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, who topped the vote count, with 40.5% of the vote. He is closely followed by the liberal Salvador Nasralla, with 39.2%, and who created a movement called Common Citizen Front to, he says, “respect the popular will”. The European Union urged all candidates to wait and respect the official result.

The noise of all political actors in the country marked a delay in the counting of votes due to the inability of the company hired by the electoral authorities to carry out the counting, interrupted several times by “technical problems”, which generated distrust among the candidates and plunged into uncertainty an electorate which participated massively and peacefully in the November 30 vote. Data Systematization Advisory Group, SAS (ASD Group) is the Colombian company under contract with the National Electoral Council (CNE) of Honduras. The company faced continued failures of the so-called TREP (Transmission of Preliminary Electoral Results) system, with system interruptions and restarts during counting and an inability to reliably manage the transmission of results, in addition to recording delays and the inability to update figures. The CNE had to recognize that the company was not ready to support the volume of data and technical requirements that an election of this magnitude represents.

Nasralla denounced Thursday in an interview with the CNN news channel the “arbitrariness” of the Colombian company, which has caused, he said, the country to remain in suspense awaiting the electoral result. “The only thing the Liberal Party is asking for is that a vote count be done, but it must be approved by the CNE. With that, everyone will be calm. And if the National Party candidate ends up winning with one vote in the count, I will be the first to accept it. But if there is no vote by vote, it is the people who will not accept the result,” he assured. Asfura, for her part, asked to wait for the total count and said it would be prudent. “We are confident in our work, you will see the result in the end,” he said.

Representatives of the ruling Free Party were more bellicose, denouncing fraud and demanding the cancellation of the presidential election. Manuel Zelaya, former president ousted by a coup in 2009 and general coordinator of the party, called on his bases to mobilize against what he defined as “electoral terrorism” and an “ongoing electoral coup.” “We strongly denounce it: we do not accept it and because of these dirty maneuvers, we demand that the elections be void,” Zelaya wrote on her profile on the social network Ana Paola Hall, president of the CNE, indicated that in response to Libre’s call for mobilization, she had asked the Chief of Joint Staff of the Army to “urgently safeguard the personnel of the CNE, the electoral materials for the 2025 general elections and the installations” of this institution. As if all these political tensions were not enough, Honduran media released a video on Friday showing a former military officer citing “intelligence information” to commit an assassination in the Central American country, without providing evidence.

The European Union published a statement on Friday in which it reiterated its support for the CNE “despite all the technical difficulties” recorded during the counting and urged all candidates to wait and respect the result. “The will of the Honduran people must be respected. The EU urges political parties and authorities to refrain from taking measures that hinder the work of electoral institutions and to respect the rule of law,” a spokesperson for the High Representative for Foreign Policy, Kaja Kallas, said in the statement.

Amid all this political chaos, Trump’s statements continue to resonate. He not only supported the conservative Asfura, called his opponents communists and threatened not to work with them if they won the elections, but he also pardoned former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for his links to drug trafficking. “From Washington, conservatives have allied themselves with drug trafficking and organized crime to restore the old order that transformed Honduras into a narco-state. Even if they pardoned the former president convicted of drug trafficking, the crimes committed against the people are not forgotten,” Castro criticized during a ceremony commemorating 200 years of the Honduran army.

“The people have been subjected to blackmail, extortion and manipulation, a direct attack against their will. I condemn the interference of President Donald Trump, who threatened the people for their support of Rixi Moncada. Sovereignty belongs solely to the Honduran people,” he added. The president also spoke out against the election result. “As president and a woman from the resistance, I must defend democracy and the dignity of the people. These elections are void. Democracy does not exist without justice and the people must not accept processes marked by interference and blackmail,” Castro said.