The agonizing vote-counting process in Honduras’s general election is entering its final stage with a result still very close, but giving a slight advantage to conservative candidate Nasri Asfora, backed by Donald Trump, who received 40.21% of the vote. He is closely followed by liberal candidate Salvador Nasrallah, with 39.48% of the vote, according to the latest examination by the National Electoral Council, which has already processed 86.54% of the votes. Asfoura asked his followers to “calm down” and wait for the final count, while Nasrallah denounced that American intervention might affect his chances of victory.
This is the third time that Nasrallah, from the Liberal Party, has aspired to the presidency of Honduras. The politician, a well-known face in the Central American country because he was a television presenter, had topped the count for one day, but his rival, the candidate of the conservative Liberal Party, outperformed him by 20,450 votes. Electoral authorities said on Friday that they would not announce the winner until the total counting of ballot papers was completed. The law gives the National Electoral Commission up to 30 days to determine the winner of the election.
Nasrallah admitted in statements to Reuters that Donald Trump’s intervention on behalf of Asfoura might affect his victory. “It hurt me, because I was winning by a much larger margin,” the candidate said. Trump exploded days before the vote with his support for Asfoura, calling both Nasrallah and ruling party candidate Rexy Moncada of the Libre Party, who received barely more than 19% support, as communists. Days later, Trump announced a pardon for former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the United States for his ties to drug trafficking. After learning of the recent results of the National Election Commission, Nasrallah condemned “attempts at fraud” and accused the electoral authorities of engineering defeat against him, as happened, he said, in the 2013 and 2017 elections. But he called on his supporters to follow the counting process closely. He said, “The data available to us is strong and puts us in the lead by a large margin. Have confidence, the final result will be in our favor. We just have to wait.”
There were also reports of fraud from the ruling party. Marlon Ochoa, a CNE consultant who represents Libre, said a “coup” and “electoral fraud” were planned against candidate Moncada. Ochoa stated in a press conference that 86.6% of the records show “errors and contradictions” in their contents, in addition to denouncing “serious” structural failures such as the slowness in transmitting the results of the records, and the falsification of vote numbers during election night while being transmitted by the so-called TREP, which is a system for transmitting preliminary results. He added: “They are not isolated events, but part of a coordinated process between the internal forces of the party leadership (referring to the National Party and the Liberal Party, which have dominated the political scene in Honduras) and allied foreign intervention that imposes an electoral decision.”
Asfoura, Trump’s standard-bearer, asked his supporters to calm down and wait until the end of the vote recount process. “People have demonstrated civility, love of democracy and commitment to freedom,” he said on Friday. He added: “I will not go out and say that there are contradictions or worsening uncertainty. The country’s stability is above any personal ambition. I ask for calm. It is a matter of time.”