![\"An](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/00238e8e-614.jpg\"\/)
\nAn election official holds an unmarked ballot after the closing of the polling stations<\/p>\n
A conservative candidate backed by US President Donald Trump led the presidential election in Honduras, according to snap results from the electoral commission.<\/p>\n
Election officials said that with just under half the votes counted, 67-year-old Nasry Asfura had a small lead over Salvador Nasralla, another right-wing candidate.<\/p>\n
Both were well ahead of the ruling leftist party candidate, signalling another Latin American nation who is poised to swing rightward.<\/p>\n
The campaign was dominated by Mr Trump’s threat to cut aid if his favoured candidate Mr Asfura were to lose.<\/p>\n
\nAn election official holds an unmarked ballot after the closing of the polling stations<\/p>\n
President Trump threw his weight behind the former Tegucigalpa mayor – whose campaign slogan was “Grandad, at your service!” – in the final days of the race.<\/p>\n
That intervention upended a contest that is still too close to call, in a country plagued by drug trafficking and gang activity.<\/p>\n
Mr Asfura held just under 41% of the vote compared to his main challenger, 72-year-old TV host, Mr Nasralla, of the Liberal Party who was on just under 39%.<\/p>\n
Sixty-year-old lawyer Rixi Moncada from the ruling leftist Libre party was trailing heavily with around 20%.<\/p>\n
Politicians and hundreds of mayors will also be elected in the fiercely polarised nation, which is also one of the most violent in Latin America.<\/p>\n
“If he (Asfura) doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” Mr Trump wrote Friday on his Truth Social platform.<\/p>\n
Mr Trump’s comments marked another brazen intervention in a neighbouring country’s politics, echoing threats he made in support of Argentine President Javier Milei’s party in that country’s recent midterms.<\/p>\n
Before yesterday’s vote, Mr Trump also announced that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, of Mr Asfura’s National Party.<\/p>\n
Hernandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for cocaine trafficking and other charges.<\/p>\n
Some Hondurans have welcomed President Trump’s interventionism, saying they hope it might mean Honduran migrants will be allowed to remain in the United States.<\/p>\n
![\"People](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/00238e8f-614.jpg\"\/)
\nPeople wait in line to vote at a polling station<\/p>\n
But others have rejected his meddling in the vote.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
Nearly 30,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States since Mr Trump returned to office in January.<\/p>\n
The clampdown has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where remittances represented 27% of GDP last year.<\/p>\n
After voting in the capital Tegucigalpa, Mr 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.”<\/p>\n
Fears of election fraud<\/p>\n
Ms Moncada – who represents outgoing President Xiomara Castro’s ruling Libre party – had portrayed the election as a choice between her and a “coup-plotting oligarchy”.<\/p>\n
That is a reference to the right’s backing of the 2009 military ouster of leftist Manuel Zelaya, Ms Castro’s husband.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A delay in the release of yesterday’s results did little to calm nerves.<\/p>\n
The president of the National Electoral Council, Ana Paola Hall, warned all parties “not to fan the flames of confrontation or violence” at the start of the single-round election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A conservative candidate backed by US President Donald Trump led the presidential election in Honduras, according to snap…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":168923,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-168922","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168922","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168922"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168922\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/168923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168922"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168922"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168922"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}