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Nasry Asfura won Honduras’ 2025 presidential election, handing victory to the center-right National Party of Honduras (PNH) and upending the political landscape of Central America.
The 40.3% to 39.5% result in favor of Asfura over Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla came after the vote counting process was affected for days by technical problems and allegations of electoral fraud by other candidates. Rixi Moncada, the candidate of the ruling FREE party, comes a distant third.
The results of the race were so close and the vote processing system so chaotic that about 15 percent of the tally sheets, which represented hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.
Two members of the electoral council and a deputy approved the results, despite disputes over the tiny vote difference. A third board member, Marlon Ocha, was not in the video declaring the winner.
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Tito Asfura defeats Salvador Nasralla and Rixi Moncada after repeated endorsements from President Trump (PA)
“Honduras: I am ready to govern. I will not let you down,” Asfura said on X after the results were confirmed.
The head of Honduran Congress, however, rejected the results and called them an “electoral coup.”
“This is totally against the law,” declared on X the president of Congress Luis Redondo, of the FREE party. “It has no value.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio congratulated Asfura on X, saying the United States “looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.”
Initially, preliminary results on Monday showed Asfura, 67, won 41 percent of the vote, edging out Nasralla, 72, who had about 39 percent.
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President Donald Trump gestures to supporters during an election night event at the State Fairgrounds, February 24, 2024. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
On Tuesday, the website created to share voting results 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 message on Truth Social.
“It looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of its presidential election,” he wrote. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
As of Thursday, Asfura held 40.05%, or about 8,000 votes ahead of Nasralla, who held 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 out and an algorithm, similar to the one used in 2013, modified the data,” Nasralla wrote on social media, specifying that 1,081,000 votes for his party were transferred to Asfura, while 1,073,000 votes for the Asfura National Party were allocated to him.
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Rixi Moncada, LIBRE candidate, is a prominent lawyer, financier and former Minister of National Defense, (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Asfura, nicknamed “Tito,” is a former mayor of Tegucigalpa and entered the race with a reputation for leadership and a focus on infrastructure, public order and efficiency.
Her victory ended a polarized election campaign, with one of the contest’s defining moments being Trump’s endorsement of Asfura.
“If he [Asfura] does not win, the United States will not spend money after losing it,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on November 28.
Before voting began on November 29, Trump also announced that he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernández, who once led the same party as Asfura. Herandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence for helping drug traffickers.
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Nasralla is a prominent television personality turned politician. (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
Ultimately, the election saw the defeat of Honduras’ centrist former vice president Nasralla and the left-wing Ramona, 60, who served under President Xiomara Castro.
As a prominent lawyer, financier, and former Minister of National Defense, she focused on institutional reform and social equity.
Nasralla, a television personality turned politician, mobilized a base but failed to convert his popularity into a winning coalition.
He focused on eliminating Honduran corruption. The Honduran presidential race has also been impacted by accusations of fraud.
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In addition to electing a new president, Hondurans voted for a new Congress and hundreds of local offices.
Reuters contributed to this report.
