Trump-Backed Asfura Wins Honduras Presidency Amid Delays

Nasry Asfura, who was backed by President Donald Trump, won Honduras' presidential election, the country's electoral authorities said Wednesday afternoon, ending a weekslong count.

The election is continuing Latin America's swing to the right, coming just a week after Chile chose the José Antonio Kast as its next president.

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

Asfura, former mayor of Honduras' capital Tegucigalpa, won in his second bid for the presidency, after he and Nasralla were neck-and-neck during a vote count that fueled international concern.

"The United States congratulates President-Elect Nasry Asfura of Honduras on his clear electoral victory, confirmed by Honduras' National Electoral Council," Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in a statement. "We look forward to working with his incoming administration to advance our bilateral and regional security cooperation, end illegal immigration to the United States, and strengthen the economic ties between our two countries.

"The United States urges all parties to respect the confirmed results so that Honduran authorities may swiftly ensure a peaceful transition of authority to President-Elect Nasry Asfura."

On Tuesday night a number of electoral officials and candidates were already fighting and contesting the results of the election.

The results were a rebuke of the current leftist leader, Xiomara Castro, and her governing democratic socialist Liberty and Re-foundation Party, known as LIBRE, whose candidate finished in a distant third place with 19.19% of the vote.

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

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

On Tuesday night, he addressed Trump in a post on X, writing: "Mr. President, your endorsed candidate in Honduras is complicit in silencing the votes of our citizens. If he is truly worthy of your backing, if his hands are clean, if he has nothing to fear, then why doesn't he allow for every vote to be counted?"

Nasralla and other Asfura opponents have maintained that Trump's last-minute endorsement was an act of electoral interference that ultimately swung the results of the vote.

For Castro, the election marked a political reckoning. She was elected in 2021 on a promise to reduce violence and root out corruption. She was among a group of progressive leaders in Latin American who were elected on a hopeful message of change but are now being cast out after failing to deliver on their vision.

Castro said last week that she would accept the results of the elections even after she claimed that Trump's actions in the election amounted to an "electoral coup." But Eric Olson, an independent international observer during the Honduran election with the Seattle International Foundation, and other observers said that the rejection of Castro and her party was so definitive that they had little room to contest the results.

"Very few people, even within LIBRE, believe they won the election," Olson said. "What they will say is there's been fraud, that there has been intervention by Donald Trump, that we should tear up the elections and vote again. But they're not saying, 'We won the elections.' It's pretty clear they did not."