Nasry Asfura has won Honduras’ 2025 presidential election, delivering victory to the right-wing National Party of Honduras (PNH) and changing Central America’s political landscape.
The 40.3% to 39.5% result in favor of Asfura over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla came after the vote-counting process was affected for days by technical problems and claims by other candidates of vote fraud. Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, finished a distant third.
The results of the race were so close, and the vote processing system so chaotic, that about 15% of the ballots, representing hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.
Two members of the electoral council and one deputy approved the results, despite disagreements about the razor-thin vote difference. A third council member, Marlon Ocha, was not in the video declaring the winner.
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“Honduras: I am ready to govern. I will not let you down,” Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.
However, the head of the Honduran Congress rejected the results, describing them as an “electoral coup.”
“This is completely outside the law,” Congress President Luis Redondo of the LIBRE party said on X. “It has no value.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on X and said the US “looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.”
Initially, Monday’s preliminary results showed Asfura, 67, had won 41 percent of the vote, giving him a narrow lead over Nasralla, 72, who had about 39 percent.
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President Donald Trump gestures to supporters during an election night watch party at the State Fairgrounds on February 24, 2024. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the website, which was set up to share voting tallies with the public, experienced technical problems and crashed, the website said Associated press.
Because the candidates combined only had 515 votes, a virtual tie and site crash caused President Trump to share a message on Truth Social.
“It appears that Honduras is trying to change the outcome of the presidential election,” he wrote. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
As of Thursday, Asfura had 40.05%, about 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who said he had 39.75%. Reuters, with the latter subsequently asking for an investigation.
“I publicly declare that today, at 3:24 a.m., the screen went dark and an algorithm, similar to the one used in 2013, changed the data,” Nasralla wrote on social media, saying 1,081,000 votes for his party were transferred to Asfura, while 1,073,000 votes for Asfura’s National Party were attributed to him.
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Rixi Moncada, LIBRE’s candidate, is a prominent lawyer, financier and former defense minister. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Asfura, nicknamed ‘Tito’, is a former mayor of Tegucigalpa and had entered the race with a reputation for leadership and focus on infrastructure, public order and efficiency.
His victory ended a polarized campaign season, with one of the contest’s defining moments being Trump’s endorsement of Asfura.
“If he [Asfura] does not win, the United States will not throw good money after bad,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on November 28.
Before the election began on November 29, Trump also said he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once led the same party as Asfura. Herandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence for aiding drug traffickers.
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Nasralla is a high-profile television personality turned politician. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Ultimately, the election defeated Honduras’ centrist former vice president Nasralla and leftist Ramona, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro.
A leading lawyer, financier and former Secretary of Defense, she focused on institutional reform and social justice.
Nasralla, a high-profile television personality turned politician, mobilized a base but failed to translate his popularity into a winning coalition.
He focused on cleaning up Honduran corruption. The Honduran presidential race was also affected by allegations of fraud.
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In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans voted for a new congress and hundreds of local positions.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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