Trump-backed candidate Asfura wins Honduras presidential election

Nasry Asfura has won the 2025 Honduras presidential election, delivering victory for the right-of-center National Party of Honduras (PNH) and shifting the political landscape of Central America. 

The 40.3% to 39.5% result in favor of Asfura over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla arrived after the vote-counting process had been delayed for days by technical glitches and claims by other candidates of vote-rigging. Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the ruling LIBRE party, came in a distant third.

The results of the race were so tight and the ballot processing system was so chaotic, that about 15% of the tally sheets, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.

Two electoral council members and one deputy approved the results despite disputes over the razor-thin difference in the vote. A third council member, Marlon Ocha, was not in a video declaring the winner.

‘Honduras: I am ready to govern. I will not let you down,’ Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.

The head of the Honduran Congress, though, rejected the results and described 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, saying the U.S. ‘looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.’

Initially, preliminary results on Monday showed Asfura, 67, had won 41% of the ballot, inching him ahead of Nasralla, 72, who had around 39%.

On Tuesday, the website set up to share vote tallies with the public experienced technical problems and crashed, according to The Associated Press.

With the candidates only having 515 votes between them, a virtual tie and site crash saw President Trump share a post on Truth Social.

‘Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,’ he wrote. ‘If they do, there will be hell to pay!’

By Thursday, Asfura had 40.05%, about 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who had 39.75%, according to Reuters, with the latter then calling for an investigation.

‘I publicly denounce 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, adding 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.

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 win ended a polarized campaign season, with one of the defining moments of the contest being Asfura’s endorsement by Trump.

‘If he [Asfura] doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,’ Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Nov. 28.

Before the start of voting Nov. 29, Trump also said he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who once led the same party as Asfura. Hernandez is serving a 45-year sentence for helping drug traffickers.

In the end, the election saw the defeat of centrist former vice president of Honduras, Nasralla and left-wing Moncada, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro. 

Moncada, a prominent lawyer, financier and former minister of national defense, focused on institutional reform and social equity.

Nasralla, a high-profile television personality turned politician, mobilized a base but fell short of converting his popularity into a winning coalition.  

He was focusing on cleaning up Honduran corruption. The Honduran presidential race was also impacted by accusations of fraud.

In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans voted for a new Congress and hundreds of local positions.

Reuters contributed to this report.