Honduras election vote count still too close to call
Honduras’ conservative presidential candidate Nasry Asfura maintained a sharp lead as counting entered its seventh day and the race was too close to be decided.
With 88 percent of the votes counted, the National Party’s Asfura received 40.19 percent of the vote, nearly 20,000 votes ahead of the Liberal Party’s Salvador Nasralla, who received 39.49 percent, according to the election authority.
Rixi Moncada of the ruling progressive LIBRE Party came in third place with 19.30 percent.
Officials said that approximately 14 percent of the votes showed discrepancies and that this rate would be reviewed.
With President Donald Trump’s support for Asfura, the race attracted close attention from the United States.
“The eyes of the world, including our own, are on Honduras,” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau wrote on social media Thursday night.
Days before voting began, Trump announced he would pardon Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former head of the Asfura National Party, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison in the United States on drug trafficking and weapons charges.
In his first video message since being released from a US prison on Tuesday, Hernandez thanked Trump for pardoning him and for Trump’s “concern for the fate of our nation.”
On Saturday, the streets of the capital Tegucigalpa remained calm as election workers across the country continued to count votes by hand.
Asfura is the 67-year-old former mayor of Tegucigalpa.
His tenure as mayor was disrupted by a series of corruption allegations.
Nasralla is a three-time presidential candidate and former popular TV host who describes himself as centre-right.
Trump’s surprise endorsement of Asfura turned the race around, he told Reuters in an interview.
Moncada, who comes after the two leading names, is a 60-year-old teacher and lawyer for the LIBRE Party, which has governed Honduras since 2022.
Honduras elects its president in a single round.
The candidate with the most votes wins, even if the gap is narrow or the candidate does not gain a majority.
