Trump-backed candidate declared winner of Honduras

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

The electoral result has continued to shift to the right in some parts of Latin America, just a week after Chile elected far-right politician José Antonio Kast as its next president.

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

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

By Tuesday night, several election officials and candidates were already fighting and questioning the election results. Meanwhile, supporters at Asfura’s campaign headquarters erupted in cheers.

“Honduras: I am prepared to govern,” wrote Asfura, former mayor of Tegucigalpa, the capital of Honduras, in a post on X shortly after the results were published. “I won’t let you down.”

The results were a rebuke to the current leftist leader and her ruling Social Democratic Freedom and Refoundation Party, known as LIBRE, whose candidate finished a distant third with 19.19% of the vote.

Asfura ran as a pragmatic politician, highlighting his popular infrastructure projects in the capital. President Trump endorsed the 67-year-old conservative just days before the vote, saying he was the only Honduran candidate the U.S. administration would work with.

“If he doesn’t win, America won’t be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter what it is,” Trump wrote in Truth Social.

Late last month, Trump also forgiven Former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, member of the National Party, accused of drug and arms trafficking, which allowed him get out of a US federal prison. The US president claimed that Hernández was “treated very harshly and unfairly”, but his decision drew criticism from some members of both parties.

Nasralla has alleged that the election was fraudulent and called for a recount of all votes just hours before the official results were announced.

On Tuesday night, she addressed Trump in a post on

He and other Asfura opponents have maintained that Trump’s last-minute endorsement was an act of election interference that ultimately changed the results of the vote.

The unexpectedly tumultuous election was also marred by slow vote counting, fueling even more accusations.

The Central American nation was stuck in limbo for more than three weeks as vote counting by electoral authorities was delayed, and at one point paralyzed after a special count of final votes was called, fueling warnings from international leaders.

Ahead of the announcement, Organization of American States Secretary General Albert Rambin on Monday made an “urgent call” to Honduran authorities to conclude a special count of the final votes before the Dec. 30 deadline. The Trump administration warned that any attempt to obstruct or delay the electoral count would have “consequences.”

For current progressive President Xiomara Castro, the election marked a political reckoning. She was elected in 2021 on a promise to reduce violence and eradicate corruption.

She was among a group of progressive leaders in Latin America who were elected with a hopeful message of change about five years ago, but are now being pushed out after failing to fulfill their vision. Castro said last week that he would accept the election results even after claiming that Trump’s actions in the election amounted to an “electoral coup.”

But Eric Olson, an independent international observer during the Honduran elections for the Seattle International Foundation, and other observers said the rejection of Castro and his party was so definitive that they had little room to challenge the results.

“Very few people, even within LIBRE, believe they won the election. What they will say is that there was fraud, that there was intervention by Donald Trump, that we should trash the election and vote again,” Olson said. “But they’re not saying ‘we won the election’. It’s pretty clear they didn’t.”