Trump-Backed Construction Magnate Wins Honduras Election
(Bloomberg) -- A conservative construction magnate backed by Donald Trump was declared the winner of Honduras’s presidential election after a long and chaotic vote count.
Nasry “Tito” Asfura won the Nov. 30 election, the electoral authority said Wednesday, narrowly beating Salvador Nasralla, a TV personality.
The most recent vote tally published on the authority’s website showed Asfura with 40.3%, versus 39.5% for Nasralla. Ruling party candidate Rixi Moncada was in third place, with 19.2%.
It took the electoral authority more than three weeks to declare a result, during which time both Nasralla and Moncada alleged foul play.
In a live stream on Facebook and TikTok on Wednesday afternoon, Nasralla called the results of the election a fraud.
“I don’t accept, because they didn’t count the votes. This was a robbery,” he said. The electoral authority “declared the results without counting all the votes.”
Nasralla compared the situation to Nicolas Maduro’s contested re-election in Venezuela last year, and referred back to Honduras’s 2017 vote, when protesters took to the streets after the then-president won a second term in a count that was widely regarded as fraudulent.
He said he would “defend” the vote by peaceful and legal means, and said he wouldn’t call people out to the street because it wouldn’t have a positive result. He also said that there was fraud in congressional and mayoral races.
The electoral authority published the vote’s results after markets closed on Christmas Eve, when many Hondurans were at family gatherings, limiting the immediate likelihood of unrest.
Asfura, 67, has pledged to cut ties with Beijing and Venezuela, and forge a close relationship with “a triangle of friendly countries”: the US, Taiwan and Israel.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quick to congratulate Asfura, saying in a post on X that the US “looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.”
The election result is a victory for Trump as he pressures trade partners to distance themselves from Beijing. This month, Chileans elected conservative José Antonio Kast as president, while in October, pro-business senator Rodrigo Paz won Bolivia’s presidential runoff. Both candidates pledged to seek better relations with Washington.
Trump stunned the nation of 11 million people two days before the election by attacking the other main candidates, and saying Asfura was the only one he would work with.
President Xiomara Castro established diplomatic relations with Beijing in 2023, ending ties with Taipei, saying this would bring trade and financing opportunities to the Central American nation. Asfura has pledged to reverse this move, saying that the relationship with China has cost jobs.
And, although Asfura is the son of Palestinian immigrants, he also pledged to seek a warm relationship with Israel. In 2021, Honduras became one of the few nations to follow the US in moving its embassy to Jerusalem, in a sign of support for the country. However, relations have since cooled.
Asfura is a civil engineer who served two terms as mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa, where he was known for overseeing large public works projects.
Honduran bonds rallied after market-friendly Asfura took the lead in preliminary vote counting.
Asfura has promised to cut red tape, build a liquefied gas pipeline connecting Mexico, El Salvador and Honduras and offer fiscal incentives for foreign direct investments, especially for US energy and infrastructure companies. He has also pledged to reduce emigration and seek new free trade agreements to boost exports.
Electoral Controversy
Honduras has a history of electoral controversy. President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in a 2009 coup, while the contested 2017 election triggered weeks of deadly protests before Juan Orlando Hernandez was sworn in for a second, consecutive term.
Hernández was later jailed in the US, but walked free from a prison in Virginia this month, where he had been serving a 45-year sentence for for conspiring to smuggle 400 tons of cocaine into the US. Hernández, who was pardoned by Trump, belonged to Asfura’s National Party of Honduras. After his release, Hernandez said he was an innocent victim of lawfare.
(Updates starting in fifth paragraph with comments from Nasralla.)
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