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04-12-2025
United States President Donald Trump has lashed out as Honduras announced that it is to conduct a manual count of votes cast in the November 30 presidential election.
The National Electoral Council (CNE) called for “patience” on Tuesday as it launched the count. Earlier, it had announced that a partial digital count had left the two frontrunners locked in a “technical tie”.
In a tirade on social media late on Monday, Trump accused the election officials of “trying to change” the outcome of the election, and doubled down on vague threats of retaliation should his favored candidate not be declared the victor of a tight race, which has been beset by problems with the results website.
In the latest update, CNE head Ana Paola Hall said Trump-backed right-wing candidate Nasry Asfura was leading centrist rival Salvador Nasralla by just 515 votes after 57 percent of the ballots had been counted.
“Faced with this technical tie, we must remain calm, be patient, and wait for the CNE to finish counting,” she said.
“Subsequently, the special counting process will be carried out in order to finalize the general count.”
Trump, who in the run-up to the vote had threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if National Party candidate Asfura were not elected, responded with a post on his Truth Social platform that claimed the CNE had “abruptly stopped counting” the votes.
He insisted that it was “imperative” that the officials finish the count and that “democracy must prevail”.
“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election,” he wrote. “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
Trump made a big impact in the campaign with his vocal endorsement of Asfura, the former mayor of the capital, Tegucigalpa, saying the US could work with him to counter drug trafficking.
His statements followed similar interventions in Argentina’s legislative elections in October, in which he threatened to cut support if President Javier Milei’s La Libertad Avanza did not emerge victorious.
Milei’s party went on to win with more than 40 percent of the vote.
Despite cheering Asfura’s forecast role in helping to fight Trump’s so-called “war on drugs”, Trump had said on Friday that he is set to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez.
The last president to come from the National Party in a country recently dominated by left-leaning political forces, Hernandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US for drug trafficking and firearms charges.
Asfura’s rival Nasralla, a former TV host, posted on X that internal projections put him ahead with 44.6 percent of the vote.
“We are not declaring ourselves the winners, just projecting the results that will be fed into the CNE,” he said, drawing criticism from Asfura’s National Party for weighing in ahead of the final vote count.
Whatever the final outcome, the election is a clear defeat for the country’s ruling left-wing, whose candidate, Rixi Moncada, was trailing well behind in third with 19 percent of the vote.
Last week, Trump said he will pardon the former leader of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez, just days before the Central American country’s closely contested presidential election.
The announcement on Friday came two days before Honduras’s vote, in which Trump has endorsed conservative National Party candidate Nasry “Tito” Asfura. (Int’l Monitoring Desk)
