Trump-backed candidate leads Honduras poll

A conservative candidate backed by US President Donald Trump led the presidential election in Honduras, according to snap results from the electoral commission.

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.

Both were well ahead of the ruling leftist party candidate, signalling another Latin American nation who is poised to swing rightward.

The campaign was dominated by Mr Trump's threat to cut aid if his favoured candidate Mr Asfura were to lose.

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.

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

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%.

Sixty-year-old lawyer Rixi Moncada from the ruling leftist Libre party was trailing heavily with around 20%.

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.

"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.

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.

Before yesterday's vote, Mr Trump also announced that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, of Mr Asfura's National Party.

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

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.

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 Mr Trump returned to office in January.

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

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."

Fears of election fraud

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".

That is a reference to the right's backing of the 2009 military ouster of leftist Manuel Zelaya, Ms 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.

A delay in the release of yesterday's results did little to calm nerves.

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.