A cliffhanger in Honduras

Apologies for the lack of blogging last week – I was busy at a conference. I’ll try to catch up on a few topics this week, starting with an election that’s attracted some attention because Donald Trump chose to take an interest in it. Honduras went to the polls yesterday (Sunday, local time) to elect a new president and legislature.

As is not unusual in Latin America, the Honduran constitution forbids presidents from serving consecutive terms, so each election is supposed to bring change in personnel if not in party. For more than a century (apart from two periods of military rule), politics was controlled by a duopoly of the National and Liberal parties, nominally centre-right and centre-left respectively but both representing the ruling elite.

Things started to go wrong in 2009 when president Manuel Zelaya, who had been elected as a Liberal but in office had shifted to the radical left, was removed from office in dubious circumstances. The National Party’s Porfirio Lobo won the election to replace him, and at the 2013 election he was succeeded by Juan Orlando Hernández, also from the Nationals. But by then the Liberals were no longer their main opponents: a new leftist party, Libre, nominated Zelaya’s wife, Xiomara Castro, as its candidate.

At this point the electoral system played a hand as well, having been designed for a two-party system. With no second round, Hernández won with just 36.9% against Castro’s 28.8%, 20.3% for the Liberal and 13.4% for anti-corruption campaigner Salvador Nasralla. But worse was to come: in 2015 the supreme court reinterpreted the constitution to allow presidents to seek a second term, so Hernández stood again in 2017.

This time Nasralla and Castro joined forces, running on a combined ticket for president and vice-president. But Hernández narrowly prevailed, 43.0% to 41.4% (with 14.7% for the Liberal), although there were substantial irregularities and a widespread perception of fraud. Yet democracy somehow survived, and in 2021, with Hernández no longer on the ballot, Castro finally won the presidency – and did it comfortably, with 51.1% to 36.9% for the Nationals’ Nasry Asfura.

Castro’s term has not been an obvious disaster, but it seems to have disappointed many of her supporters. Libre’s candidate this time is Rixi Moncada, former finance minister and defence minister, and while she has been competitive in the polls she has been fairly consistently running third. The general expectation was that the election would be a contest between Asfura, running again for the National Party, and Nasralla, now representing the Liberals.

In the meantime, the Castro administration had extradited Hernández to the United States to face charges of drug trafficking, and last year he was convicted in New York and sentenced to 45 years imprisonment. That might be thought to be some embarrassment for his party, but Trump has tried to help out by promising to pardon him – despite currently conducting a program of extra-legal strikes against alleged “narcoterrorists”. As usual, politics takes precedence over consistency, and the drugs issue only comes into play when it can be used against the left.

Trump has also offered more direct backing for Asfura, threatening to cut off aid to Honduras if he is not elected and describing Nasralla as “a borderline Communist”. And the first results yesterday suggested that his tactics might have worked, with Asfura taking an early but narrow lead, of the order of two or three percentage points.

That lead has now almost vanished, but the count is excruciatingly slow. With 57% of polling places in, Asfura’s lead is down to just 485515 votes: he has 39.91% to Nasralla’s 39.89%, with Moncada way back on 19.2%. (Official results are here, although the site isn’t loading for me today; you can follow the live feed at La Prensa.) According to the BBC, the electoral commission describes this as a “technical tie” and has called for “patience and prudence” while the counting continues.

Back in 2021 counting was also extremely slow, with only about two-thirds counted by the fourth day. On that occasion the later counting trended slightly towards the right: Asfura was on 33.9% with half the vote counted, from which he improved by three points. This time, so far, it’s going the other way, but perhaps that will change.

Updates to follow when new figures emerge.

UPDATE, Wednesday 6.30pm (Honduran time): Two days later, the count has advanced to 79.4% and Nasralla has hit the front, although it’s still very close. He’s about 14,000 votes ahead, with 40.23% to Asfura’s 39.68%. That gap was actually a bit larger a couple of hours ago, so the late counting may be favoring Asfura (as it did last time), in which case it’s anyone’s guess.

Further details in the BBC’s updated story, which also reports that Trump’s pardon for Hernández has gone through and he has walked free.

UPDATE, Thursday 7.50pm (Honduran time): Late counting has indeed favored Asfura. With now 86.3% reporting, he’s back in the lead with 40.25% to Nasralla’s 39.40%, a gap of about 23,500 votes. That’s still close, but not close enough that it’s likely to change – it would be an upset for Nasralla to win from here.

It’s important to remember, though, that assuming Asfura wins it will be courtesy of a very bad electoral system. The left’s Moncada has 19.3% of the vote, of which no doubt the large majority would have preferred Nasralla to Asfura: with a fair system (either preferential or two-round voting) Nasralla would have won comfortably.