U.S. President Donald Trump-backed candidate Nasry Asfura won Honduras’ presidential election, electoral authorities said on Wednesday (December 24, 2025) afternoon, ending a weeks-long count that has whittled away at the credibility of the Central American nation’s fragile electoral system.

The election is continuing Latin America’s swing to the right, coming just a week after Chile chose the far-right politician José Antonio Kast as its next President.

Mr. Asfura, of the conservative National Party, received 40.27% of the vote in the Nov 30 election, edging out four-time candidate Salvador Nasralla of the conservative Liberal Party, who finished with 39.53% of the vote.

The former Mayor of Honduras’ capital Tegucigalpa, won in his second bid for the presidency, after he and Mr. Nasralla were neck-and-neck during a weeks-long vote count that fuelled international concern.

On Tuesday night, a number of electoral officials and candidates were already fighting and contesting the results of the election. Meanwhile, followers in Mr. Asfura’s campaign headquarters erupted into cheers.

“Honduras: I am prepared to govern,” wrote Mr. Asfura in a post on X shortly after the results were released. “I will not let you down.”

The results were a rebuke of the current leftist leader, 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.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Mr. Asfura on Wednesday, writing on a post on X: “The people of Honduras have spoken … (the Trump administration) looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.”

A number of right-leaning leaders across Latin America, namely Trump-ally Argentine President Javier Milei, also congratulated the politician.

Mr. Asfura ran as a pragmatic politician, pointing to his popular infrastructure projects in the capital. Mr. 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.

Mr. Nasralla maintained the claim that the election was fraudulent on Wednesday, saying electoral authorities who announced the results “betrayed the Honduran people.”

On Tuesday night, he also addressed Mr. 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?”

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

The unexpectedly tumultuous election was also marred by a sluggish vote count, which fuelled even more accusations.

The Central American nation was stuck in limbo for more than three weeks as vote counting by electoral authorities lagged, and at one point was paralysed after a special count of final vote tallies was called, fuelling warnings by international leaders.

After expressing democratic concern about the lack of results days before, Organization of American States Secretary General Albert Ramdin wrote on a post on X on Wednesday that the OAS “takes note” of the results announced and noted it is “closely following events in Honduras.” It also condemned electoral authorities for announcing the results while the final .07% of votes were counted with such razor-thin margins in the election.

For the incumbent, progressive President Xiomara 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 America who were elected on a hopeful message of change around five years ago 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 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. What they will say is there’s been fraud, that there has been intervention by Donald Trump, that we we should tear up the elections and vote again,” Mr. Olson said. “But they’re not saying we won the elections.’ It’s pretty clear they did not.”

Published – December 25, 2025 06:37 am IST

Members of the military screen an employee entering the National Electoral Council (CNE) facility as the vote count in the November 30 presidential election resumes after being suspended for three days, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras on December 8, 2025.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

A conservative candidate backed by U.S. President Donald Trump narrowly leads a right-wing rival in Honduras’s presidential election, according to partial results from the electoral commission released Monday (December 1, 2025).

Nasry Asfura, 67, had 40% of the votes and led Salvador Nasralla by just 0.2% points, with 56% of votes counted, according to the National Electoral Council (CNE).

Both candidates were more than 20% points ahead of Rixi Moncada, 60, of the ruling leftist Libre party, who was trailing heavily, signaling another Latin American nation poised to swing rightward.

The campaign was dominated by Mr. Trump’s threat to cut aid if his favored candidate Asfura, who is nicknamed “grandad,” were to lose.

The vote count from Sunday’s (November 30, 2025) election has progressed slowly, and final results could take days.

Many Hondurans have fled grinding poverty and violence to the United States, including minors fearing forced recruitment by gangs, although this escape route is no longer a viable option under Mr. Trump.

In the final days of the race, the U.S. leader threw his weight behind former Tegucigalpa mayor Asfura, whose campaign slogan was “Grandad, at your service!”

That intervention upended a contest that is still too close to call, in a country plagued by drug trafficking and gang activity.

Lawmakers and hundreds of mayors will also be elected in the fiercely polarized nation, which is also one of the most violent in Latin America.

“If he (Asfura) doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” Mr. Trump wrote Friday (November 28, 2025) on his Truth Social platform.

‘Not because of Trump’

Mr. Trump’s comments marked another brazen intervention in another country’s politics, echoing threats he made in support of Argentine President Javier Milei’s party in recent midterms.

Before Sunday’s (November 30, 2025) vote, Mr. Trump also made the shock announcement that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, of Asfura’s National Party.

Mr. Hernandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for cocaine trafficking and other charges.

Some Hondurans have welcomed Mr. Trump’s intervention, saying they hope it might mean Honduran migrants will be allowed to remain in the United States.

But others have rejected his meddling in the vote.

“I vote for whomever I please, not because of what Trump has said, because the truth is I live off my work, not off politicians,” Esmeralda Rodriguez, a 56-year-old fruit seller, told AFP.

Nearly 30,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States since Trump returned to office in January.

The clampdown has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where remittances accounted for 27% of GDP last year.

After voting in the capital Tegucigalpa, Asfura denied that the planned pardon would benefit him, saying: “This issue has been circulating for months, and it has nothing to do with the elections.”

‘Escape poverty’

Presidential hopeful Moncada, who represents outgoing leader Xiomara Castro’s ruling Libre party, had portrayed the election as a choice between her and a “coup-plotting oligarchy.”

That was a reference to the right’s backing of the 2009 military ouster of leftist Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband.

Preemptive accusations of election fraud, made both by the ruling party and opposition, have sown mistrust in the vote and sparked fears of post-election unrest.

Long a transit point for cocaine exported from Colombia to the United States, Honduras is now also a producer of the drug.

But the candidates barely addressed the fears of Hondurans about drug trafficking, poverty and violence during the campaign.

“I hope the new government will have good lines of communication with Trump, and that he will also support us,” said Maria Velasquez, 58.

“I just want to escape poverty.”

Published – December 02, 2025 04:13 am IST