Tegucigalpa
Reuters
—
Honduran presidential candidate Salvador Nasralla mentioned last-minute interference from US President Donald Trump within the nation’s closely fought election had damaged his chances of successful and left him trailing as vote counting dragged on.
Nasralla, a three-time presidential hopeful who describes himself as center-right, mentioned in an interview with Reuters that Trump’s surprise endorsement final week of the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura had flipped the race.
“It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin,” Nasralla mentioned at a lodge in downtown Tegucigalpa, rejecting Trump’s label of him as a “borderline communist.”
The newest outcomes launched on Thursday by the electoral authority confirmed Nasralla narrowly trailing within the election, with 39.38% of the vote to Asfura’s 40.27%, with round 87% of the ballots counted.
That slim margin may simply flip. Roughly 17% of ballots have “inconsistencies” and will likely be reviewed, in response to Honduras’s electoral authority.
Nasralla additionally criticized Trump’s pardon on the eve of the election of former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was serving a 45-year jail time period for drug trafficking within the United States.
“I think he deserves punishment in Honduras. I don’t know for how long, but he deserves punishment and the Honduran justice system has to prosecute and punish him,” Nasralla mentioned.
Asfura’s conservative National Party solid a detailed partnership with Washington underneath Hernandez, who ruled from 2014 to 2022 and was arrested shortly after leaving workplace.
Trump has made no secret of his objective to forge a bloc of conservative allies within the area, stretching from Nayib Bukele in El Salvador to Javier Milei in Argentina.
Amid disruptions within the counting of ballots from Sunday’s election and allegations of fraud, Nasralla has accused rivals of plotting to steal the election.
Nasralla mentioned his suspicions of election tampering flared round 3:00 a.m. on Thursday when his crew reported the election web site out of the blue went darkish. When it got here again on-line, “everything had flipped,” he mentioned. His slim lead had vanished, leaving him barely behind.
“That suggests some algorithm changed that shouldn’t have,” he added, although he acknowledged he has no proof of wrongdoing.
Fraud allegations haunted Honduras within the fiercely contested 2017 presidential election, with widespread accusations of manipulated vote tallies and irregularities.
Honduras’ election officers this week urged calm as they work to resolve problems with its speedy depend system, technical points affecting an online portal designed to show real-time outcomes, and unannounced system upkeep.
On Monday, with Asfura forward within the vote depend, Trump hurled allegations of attainable fraud with out proof and mentioned there will likely be “hell to pay” if outcomes had been modified.
The Organization of American States has to this point not documented any manipulation and different consultants chalked up the vote depend delays to incompetence slightly than fraud.
“They all had a hand in building a pretty weak and broken electoral system and this is a byproduct of all that infighting that went on for weeks and months,” mentioned Eric Olson, a senior coverage advisor on the Seattle International Foundation and knowledgeable on Honduran politics. “This process is not great but it happens all the time in the case of Honduras.”