Trump-backed Nasry Asfura clinches victory in Honduras polls

Trumpbacked candidate Nasry Asfura won Honduras presidential election electoral authorities said Wednesday afternoon ending a weekslong count that has whittled away at the credibility of the Central American nations fragile electoral systemThe election is continuing Latin Americas swing to the right coming just a week after Chile chose the farright politician Jose Antonio Kast as its next presidentAsfura of the conservative National Party received 4027 per cent of the vote in the Nov 30 election edging out fourtime candidate Salvador Nasralla of the conservative Liberal Party who finished with 3953 per cent of the voteThe former mayor of Honduras capital Tegucigalpa won in his second bid for the presidency after he and Nasralla were neckandneck during a weekslong vote count that fuelled international concernOn Tuesday night a number of electoral officials and candidates were already fighting and contesting the results of the election Meanwhile followers in Asfuras campaign headquarters erupted into cheersHonduras I am prepared to govern wrote Asfura in a post on X shortly after the results were released I will not let you downThe results were a rebuke of the current leftist leader and her governing democratic socialist Liberty and Refoundation Party known as LIBRE whose candidate finished in a distant third place with 1919 per cent of the voteSecretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated 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 hemisphereA number of rightleaning leaders across Latin America namely Trumpally Argentine President Javier Milei also congratulated the politicianAsfura ran as a pragmatic politician pointing to his popular infrastructure projects in the capital Trump endorsed the 67yearold conservative just days before the vote saying he was the only Honduran candidate the US administration would work withNasralla maintained the claim that the election was fraudulent on Wednesday saying electoral authorities who announced the results betrayed the Honduran peopleOn Tuesday night he also 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 doesnt he allow for every vote to be countedHe and other opponents of Asfura have maintained that Trumps lastminute endorsement was an act of electoral interference that ultimately swung the results of the voteThe unexpectedly tumultuous election was also marred by a sluggish vote count which fuelled even more accusationsThe 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 leadersAfter 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 per cent of votes were counted with such razorthin margins in the electionFor 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 corruptionShe 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 visionCastro said last week that she would accept the results of the elections even after she claimed that Trumps actions in the election amounted to an electoral coupBut 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 resultsVery few people even within LIBRE believe they won the election What they will say is theres been fraud that there has been intervention by Donald Trump that we we should tear up the elections and vote again Olson said But theyre not saying we won the elections Its pretty clear they did not Janetsky reported from Mexico City