TEGUCIGALPA: A conservative candidate backed by US President Donald Trump and nicknamed “grandad” led Sunday’s presidential election in Honduras, according to snap results from the electoral commission.
Election officials said that with just under half the votes counted, 67-year-old Nasry Asfura had a small lead over Salvador Nasralla, another right-wing candidate.
Both were well ahead of the ruling leftist party candidate, signaling another Latin American nation is poised to swing rightward.
The campaign was dominated by Trump’s threat to cut aid if his favored candidate Asfura were to lose.
Trump threw his weight behind the former Tegucigalpa mayor — whose campaign slogan was “Grandad, at your service!” — in the final days of the race.
That intervention upended a contest that is still too close to call, in a country plagued by drug trafficking and gang activity.
Asfura held just under 41 percent of the vote compared to his main challenger, 72-year-old TV host, Nasralla, of the Liberal Party who was on just under 39 percent.
Sixty-year-old lawyer Rixi Moncada from the ruling leftist Libre party was trailing heavily with around 20 percent.
Lawmakers and hundreds of mayors will also be elected in the fiercely polarized nation, which is also one of the most violent in Latin America.
“If he (Asfura) doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad,” Trump wrote Friday on his Truth Social platform.
Trump’s comments marked another brazen intervention in a neighboring country’s politics, echoing threats he made in support of Argentine President Javier Milei’s party in that country’s recent midterms.
Before Sunday’s vote, Trump also made the shock announcement that he would pardon former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez, of Asfura’s National Party.
Hernandez is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for cocaine trafficking and other charges.
Some Hondurans have welcomed Trump’s interventionism, saying they hope it might mean Honduran migrants will be allowed to remain in the United States.
But others have rejected his meddling in the vote.
“I vote for whomever I please, not because of what Trump has said, because the truth is I live off my work, not off politicians,” Esmeralda Rodriguez, a 56-year-old fruit seller, said.
Nearly 30,000 Honduran migrants have been deported from the United States since Trump returned to office in January.
The clampdown has dealt a severe blow to the country of 11 million people, where remittances represented 27 percent of GDP last year.
After voting in the capital Tegucigalpa, Asfura denied that the planned pardon would benefit him, saying: “This issue has been circulating for months, and it has nothing to do with the elections.”
Fears of election fraud
Moncada — who represents outgoing President Xiomara Castro’s ruling Libre party — had portrayed the election as a choice between her and a “coup-plotting oligarchy.”
That is a reference to the right’s backing of the 2009 military ouster of leftist Manuel Zelaya, Castro’s husband.
Preemptive accusations of election fraud, made both by the ruling party and opposition, have sown mistrust in the vote and sparked fears of post-election unrest.
A delay in the release of Sunday’s results did little to calm nerves.
The president of the National Electoral Council, Ana Paola Hall, warned all parties “not to fan the flames of confrontation or violence” at the start of the single-round election.
‘Escape poverty’
Long a transit point for cocaine exported from Colombia to the United States, Honduras is now also a producer of the drug.
But the candidates barely addressed the fears of Hondurans about drug trafficking, poverty and violence during the campaign.
“I hope the new government will have good lines of communication with Trump, and that he will also support us,” said Maria Velasquez, 58.
“I just want to escape poverty.”
Trump-backed candidate leads Honduras poll
https://arab.news/bptg4
Trump-backed candidate leads Honduras poll
- Election officials said that with just under half the votes counted, Nasry Asfura had a small lead over Salvador Nasralla
- Donald Trump’s comments marked another brazen intervention in a neighboring country’s politics
Putin says there are points he can’t agree to in the US proposal to end Russia’s war in Ukraine
- He emphasized that Russia will fulfill the goals it set and take all of the eastern Donetsk region
- “All this boils down to one thing: Either we take back these territories by force, or eventually Ukrainian troops withdraw,” he said
Russian President Vladimir Putin says some proposals in a US plan to end the war in Ukraine are unacceptable to the Kremlin, indicating in comments published Thursday that any deal is still some ways off.
US President Donald Trump has set in motion the most intense diplomatic push to stop the fighting since Russia launched the full-scale invasion of its neighbor nearly four years ago. But the effort has once again run into demands that are hard to reconcile, especially over whether Ukraine must give up land to Russia and how it can be kept safe from any future aggression by Moscow.
Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law Jared Kushner planned to meet later Thursday with the Ukrainian delegation led by Rustem Umerov following the Americans’ discussions with Putin at the Kremlin, but there was no immediate confirmation whether that meeting took place.
The meeting at the Shell Bay Club, a golf property developed by Witkoff in Hallandale Beach, was tentatively set to begin at 5 p.m. EST, according to an official familiar with the logistics. The official was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly because the meeting has not yet been formally announced and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Putin said his five-hour talks Tuesday with Witkoff and Kushner were “necessary” and “useful,” but also “difficult work,” and some proposals were unacceptable.
Speaking to the India Today television channel before he landed Thursday in New Delhi for a state visit, Putin said the American proposals discussed at the Kremlin meeting were based on earlier discussions between Russia and the US, including his meeting with Trump in Alaska in August, but also included new elements.
“We had to go through practically every point, which is why it took so much time,” he said. “It was a meaningful, highly specific and substantive conversation. Sometimes we said, ‘Yes, we can discuss this, but with that one we cannot agree.’“
Trump said Wednesday that Witkoff and Kushner came away from the marathon session confident that Putin wants to find an end to the war. “Their impression was very strongly that he’d like to make a deal,” he added.
Putin said the initial US 28-point peace proposal was trimmed to 27 points and split into four packages. He refused to elaborate on what Russia could accept or reject, and none of the other officials involved offered details of the talks.
The Russian leader praised Trump’s peace efforts, noting that “achieving consensus among conflicting parties is no easy task.”
“To say now what exactly doesn’t suit us or where we could possibly agree seems premature, since it might disrupt the very mode of operation that President Trump is trying to establish,” Putin said.
He emphasized that Russia will fulfill the goals it set and take all of the eastern Donetsk region. “All this boils down to one thing: Either we take back these territories by force, or eventually Ukrainian troops withdraw,” he said.
European leaders, left on the sidelines by Washington as US officials engage directly with Moscow and Kyiv, have accused Putin of feigning interest in Trump’s peace drive.
French President Emmanuel Macron met in Beijing with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, seeking to involve him in pressuring Russia toward a ceasefire. Xi, whose country has provided strong diplomatic support for Putin, did not say respond to France’s call, but said that “China supports all efforts that work toward peace.”
Russian barrages of civilian areas of Ukraine continued overnight into Thursday. A missile struck Kryvyi Rih on Wednesday night, wounding six people, including a 3-year-old girl, according to city administration head Oleksandr Vilkul.
The attack on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s hometown damaged more than 40 residential buildings, a school and domestic gas pipes, Vilkul said.
A 6-year-old girl died in the southern city of Kherson after Russian artillery shelling wounded her the previous day, regional military administration chief Oleksandr Prokudin wrote on Telegram.
The Kherson Thermal Power Plant, which provides heat for over 40,000 residents, shut down Thursday after Russia pounded it with drones and artillery for several days, he said.
Authorities planned emergency meetings to find alternate sources of heating, he said. Until then, tents were erected across the city where residents could warm up and charge electronic devices.
Russia also struck Odesa with drones, wounding six people, while civilian and energy infrastructure was damaged, said Oleh Kiper, head of the regional military administration.
Overall, Russia fired two ballistic missiles and 138 drones at Ukraine overnight, officials said.
Meanwhile, in the Russia-occupied part of the Kherson region, two men were killed by a Ukrainian drone strike on their vehicle Thursday, Moscow-installed regional leader Vladimir Saldo said. A 68-year-old woman was also wounded in the attack, he said.
