Trump-backed candidate leads polls in Honduras presidential election

Polarized nation appears poised to swing back to the right in elections dominated by Trump’s threat to cut aid if Nasry Asfura not elected; Asfura’s party has been strongly pro-Israel

TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AFP) — A conservative candidate backed by US President Donald Trump and nicknamed “grandad” led Sunday’s 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 is poised to swing rightward.

The campaign was dominated by Trump’s threat to cut aid if his favored candidate Asfura were to lose.

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.

Asfura held just under 41 percent of the vote compared to his main challenger, 72-year-old TV host Nasralla, of the Liberal Party, who was on just under 39 percent.

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

Lawmakers and hundreds of mayors will also be elected in the fiercely polarized 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,” Trump wrote Friday on his Truth Social platform.

Trump’s comments marked another brazen intervention in a neighboring country’s politics, echoing threats he made in support of Argentine President Javier Milei’s party in that country’s recent midterms.

Before Sunday’s vote, Trump also made the shock announcement that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, of Asfura’s National Party.

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

During Hernandez’s term, from 2014 to 2022, Honduras adopted fiercely pro-Israel policies and in 2021 moved its embassy to Jerusalem, following the US’s lead.

But under his left-wing successor, Xiomara Castro, the Latin American country has swung in the other direction, and in November 2023, it recalled its ambassador to Israel over what it said was the “serious humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip,” due to the war sparked by Hamas’s invasion of Israel the previous month.

Some Hondurans have welcomed Trump’s election 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 Trump returned to office in January.

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

After voting in the capital Tegucigalpa, 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

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, 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 Sunday’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.

‘Escape poverty’

Long a transit point for cocaine exported from Colombia to the United States, Honduras is now also a producer of the drug.

But the candidates barely addressed the fears of Hondurans about drug trafficking, poverty and violence during the campaign.

“I hope the new government will have good lines of communication with Trump, and that he will also support us,” said Maria Velasquez, 58.

“I just want to escape poverty.”

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report.