Conservative politician Nasry Asfura is back in the lead in Honduras’ ongoing presidential vote count on Thursday, enjoying a roughly 8,800-vote difference against Liberal candidate Salvador Nasralla as of Thursday morning.
Honduras’s 2025 presidential race remains mired in tense uncertainty at press time as the country’s National Electoral Council (CNE) slowly progresses with the vote count from Sunday’s election.
The most recent results provided by CNE, as reported by both Honduras’ El Heraldo and Argentina’s Infobae, indicate that, with 85 percent of the tallies counted, National Party of Honduras (PNH) candidate Asfura has 40.06 percent and Liberal Party’s Nasralla 39.74. The candidates are separated by a slim 8,815-vote difference.
The ruling socialist Libre party’s candidate, Rixi Moncada, remains in third position with 19.18 percent, which mathematically leaves her out of a possibility of winning the extremely close race.
El Heraldo detailed that Asfura, a former mayor and lawmaker who received President Donald Trump’s endorsement for the election, regained the lead in the race in the early morning hours of Thursday after CNE published a new preliminary vote update, eliciting celebrations in Asfura’s electoral command headquarters. The extremely slow vote count has seen both Asfura and Nasralla swap positions in the race several times over the past four days.
Nasralla denounced on Thursday that in the early morning hours the results screen allegedly “went black” and claimed that an “algorithm” allegedly “changed the data.” According to the candidate, his votes were given to Asfura and vice versa, and he called for an investigation into the Colombian company involved in the vote transmission systems. At press time, Nasralla has not publicly presented evidence backing those accusations.
The ongoing situation with Honduras’s drip-fed results prompted President Trump to express his concerns about the process in a Truth Social post on Monday in which he warned that there will be “hell to pay” if the results are altered. At the time of President Trump’s post, Asfura only had a 515-vote lead against Nasralla. According to local electoral law, the CNE has up to 30 days to present official results.
The vote count process reportedly made slow progress again throughout Wednesday as a result of a “maintenance” of the reporting system by the company in charge. CNE head Ana Paula Hall asserted in a social media post that the maintenance, which led to a halt in the process, was done “without consulting or obtaining approval from the full board of directors.”
“This process is too costly for Hondurans to allow this to happen,” Hall wrote. “I will continue to provide updates.”
In a statement on Tuesday, the CNE attributed the ongoing delays to “technical problems” allegedly experienced by the service hired by the electoral authority using the online vote tally reporting system. As a “temporary measure,” CNE enabled a secure public space to allow party representatives, media, and electoral observers to monitor the slow vote counting process.
On Monday, socialist candidate Rixi Moncada — who is set to finish third in the presidential race regardless of who ends up winning — accused President Trump of committing “electoral fraud and interference” through a purported “direct imperial foreign interference” by endorsing conservative candidate Asfura.
President Trump gave his endorsement to Asfura last week, condemning in a Truth Social post Moncada’s public admiration of late Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro. Trump also criticized Nasralla as a “borderline communist,” as the Liberal Party candidate previously served as vice president for Honduras’ current socialist President Xiomara Castro (no relation to the Cuban dictator).
“President Donald Trump labels me a communist, that tired old Cold War tactic. The Honduran people who know me will always be on my side, outraged by his interference,” Moncada said on Monday.
Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.
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