Former Honduran vice president and current presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla claimed to Reuters on Thursday that President Donald Trump’s “last-minute interference” in the still-undefined election “damaged” his chances of winning.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) is still slowly counting votes five days after the November 30 presidential election, leaving the country in tense uncertainty regarding the extremely narrow race between conservative politician Nasry Asfura of the National Party of Honduras (PNH) and Nasralla of the centrist Liberal Party.
At press time, the latest publicly known results reported by the Honduran newspaper El Heraldo indicate that Asfura remains in the lead with a 20,659 vote difference between him and Nasralla. As of Friday morning, CNE has reportedly finished counting 87.54 percent of the votes.
Days before the election, President Trump gave his endorsement to Asfura in a Truth Social post, stressing that he could work together with the conservative candidate to “fight the narcocommunists.”
In the same post, President Trump criticized Nasralla and Rixi Moncada of the leftist Libre party, who represented the current government of socialist President Xiomara Castro. Trump condemned Nasralla as a “borderline communist,” as Nasralla had served as Castro’s vice president before resigning to run for office. Trump also condemned Moncada for her public admiration of Cuba’s late murderous communist dictator Fidel Castro.
Nasralla, who at press time is second in the race, spoke with Reuters in Tegucigalpa on Thursday and claimed that President Trump’s endorsement of Asfura “flipped” the race in favor of the conservative candidate. Nasralla described himself to Reuters as “center-right,” rejecting President Trump’s “borderline communist” description.
“It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin,” Nasralla asserted.
Nasralla briefly took the lead in the race this week before Asfura once again overtook him on Thursday as CNE published newer updates to the still-ongoing vote count. On Thursday morning, Nasralla levied accusations of “fraud” through a social media post, but has not publicly presented evidence that can substantiate his claims at press time.
The Liberal Party candidate explained to Reuters that his suspicions of “fraud” arose around 3:00 a.m. (local time) on Thursday when his team said that the electoral results website “went dark.” According to Nasralla, “everything had flipped” by the time the website allegedly came back, with him once again in second place.
“That suggests some algorithm changed that shouldn’t have,” Nasralla said. According to Reuters, he acknowledged that he has “no proof of wrongdoing.”
Reuters reported that the Organization of American States (OAS) has so far not documented any vote manipulation, with experts chalking up the slow vote count to “incompetence rather than fraud.”
“They all had a hand in building a pretty weak and broken electoral system and this is a byproduct of all that infighting that went on for weeks and months,” Eric Olson, senior policy advisor at the Seattle International Foundation and expert on Honduran politics, told Reuters. “This process is not great but it happens all the time in the case of Honduras.”
Honduras’ electoral authority released a statement this week in which it attributed the delay to alleged “technical problems” experienced by the reporting platform of the service hired for online vote tallies. On Wednesday, CNE head Ana Paula Hall asserted that a new delay that occurred that day was caused by maintenance in the platform which, according to her, was done “without consulting or obtaining approval from the full board of directors.”
President Trump expressed his concerns on the Honduran presidential vote count amid the first wave of delays through a Monday Truth Social post — and warned that there would be “hell to pay” if the results were altered.
Although the razor-thin presidential race remains undefined at press time, El Heraldo reported on Friday morning that the National Party of Honduras won in at least 153 out of the 298 mayoral races during Sunday’s elections, 11 more than the 142 obtained in the 2021 elections. The Liberal party won in 73 mayoral elections, down from the 91 obtained in 2021. The ruling leftist Libre party, for his part, secured 68 mayoral positions, 21 more than the 48 obtained in the previous elections.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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