Trump-backed candidate Nasry Asfura won Honduras’ presidential election, the country’s electoral authorities said on Wednesday afternoon, ending a weeks-long count that has whittled away at the credibility of the Central American nation’s fragile electoral system.
The election is continuing Latin America’s swing to the right, coming just a week after Chile chose the far-right politician Jose Antonio Kast as its next president.
Asfura, of the conservative National Party, received 40.27 per cent of the vote in the November 30 poll, edging out four-time candidate Salvador Nasralla of the conservative Liberal Party, who finished with 39.39 per cent of the vote.
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Asfura, the former mayor of Honduras’ capital Tegucigalpa, won in his second bid for the presidency, after he and Nasralla were neck-and-neck during a weeks-long vote count that fuelled international concern.
On Tuesday night, a number of electoral officials and candidates were already fighting and contesting the results of the election.
The results were a rebuke of the current leftist leader and her governing democratic socialist Liberty and Refoundation Party, known as Libre, whose candidate finished in a distant third place with 19.19 per cent of the vote.