Right-wing rivals in Honduras presidential race locked in a ‘technical tie’
Trump-backed Nasry Asfura leads Salvador Nasralla by a razor-thin margin as the election council begins a manual vote count
A businessman who has US President Donald Trump’s backing for the presidency of Honduras was locked in a “technical tie” with a right-wing TV host after a preliminary vote count, the Central American country’s electoral body said on Monday.
Nasry Asfura, 67, led 72-year-old rival Salvador Nasralla by just 515 votes, making it a “technical tie”, National Electoral Council (CNE) head Ana Paola Hall said on X after a partial digital tally of Sunday’s down-to-the-wire ballot.
She called for “patience” as the CNE started a manual count in a vote that left the ruling left-leaning party out in the cold in one of Latin America’s most impoverished and violent countries.
Days before the vote, former Tegucigalpa mayor Asfura won the backing of Trump - as the US president sought to put his finger on the scale of another Latin American election.
In a post to his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump accused the Honduran electoral body of “trying to change the results” of the vote, adding: “If they do, there will be hell to pay!”