Asfura, Trump’s Candidate, Returns to the Lead in Honduras
With 84.5% of ballots counted, conservative Nasry Asfura reaches 40.34%, followed by conservative liberal Salvador Nasralla with 39.57%.
HAVANA TIMES – Conservative Nasry “Papi” Asfura returned to the lead on Thursday, December 4, 2025, in the vote count from the Honduran elections held on November 30, as the tally reached 84.52% of votes, according to the National Electoral Council (CNE).
Asfura, of the National Party, had accumulated 1,083,621 ballots (40.05%), compared with 1,075,313 (39.74%) for Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, also conservative.
As of Wednesday, December 3, Nasralla had held a lead of up to 20,000 votes over Asfura in the tightly contested count.
The presidential candidate of the ruling Liberty and Refoundation Party (Libre, left), Rixi Moncada, remains in third place with 517,696 votes (18.15%).
The vote count has been disrupted by outages in the CNE’s system, according to its president, Ana Paola Hall, who has called for calm and patience from Hondurans closely following the results.
The winning candidate will take office on January 27, 2026, succeeding Honduras’ current president, Xiomara Castro, who assumed office in January 2022 under the banner of Libre— a party that is refusing to accept the results being published on the CNE website.
Hondurans voted to elect a president, three presidential designates (vice presidents), 128 members of the local Parliament, 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament, and 298 municipal governments.
Asfura, the Candidate Backed by Trump, vs. Nasralla
The Honduran elections on Sunday, November 29, were marked at the last minute by the surprising endorsement from US president Donald Trump for the presidential hopeful Asfura, a politician of Palestinian origin with limited experience in public administration.
In addition to urging voters to support the presidential candidate, Trump promised that if Asfura won, “there will be a lot of support” for the Central American country, which is battered by poverty and waves of migration northward. He called Asfura “the only true friend of freedom in Honduras.”
Trump also said that with Asfura he saw the possibility of “working together to fight narco-communists” and confront Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro.
That US backing, just days before the elections, came alongside the announced pardon of former president Juan Orlando Hernández (2014–2022), convicted of drug trafficking in the United States and a member of the same political party as Asfura.
The National Party is a political organization that suffered wear and tear during the three terms it governed between 2010 and 2022, after being implicated in corruption scandals and alleged ties to drug-trafficking networks, according to investigations and journalistic reports.
Even so, Asfura leads the vote count by a narrow margin over Nasralla, the conservative who, with “optimism,” maintains hope of reversing the results to end the Liberal Party’s 16-year absence from the presidency—though without US support.
First published in Spanish by Confidencial and translated and posted in English by Havana Times.