Honduran Parties Negotiate Non-Violent Exit to Elections Won by the Right

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On Monday, December 1, one day after the contested and polarized Honduran election, not a single tire was burned in Tegucigalpa. Not a single store in the city center was looted, although large and small businesses boarded up their windows with wood or metal before the first results were announced. There were no demonstrations paralyzing the city’s main boulevards, even though the ruling party’s coordinator, former President Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, had called for them in the central Morazán Boulevard in the afternoon to “defend the victory” of “a party of ideals proven in the streets.” Most election observers expected confrontations on election night, a concern fueled by weeks of accusations of fraud between the parties, a history of protests in 2013 and 2017, and the intervention two days before the vote of U.S. President Donald Trump.

On Sunday afternoon and evening, senior officials from the state and the Liberty and Refoundation Party declared that their presidential candidate, Rixi Moncada, “had already won,” citing only an alleged exit poll, illegally broadcast on affiliated media outlets such as UNE TV before the polls closed. At the Hotel Maya, solidarity groups and influencers celebrated while the television channel ran disinformation on the big screen saying that Moncada had won the election. In response, the opposition parties published their own polls in the afternoon, which gave their candidates the lead. But by Monday, the enthusiasm had vanished from the Hotel Maya and the empty press room at Libre’s headquarters.

There was no winner, but there was —and still is— one certainty: everything points to Libre having no chance of victory. At 10:40 p.m. the night before, with a third of the votes counted, the National Electoral Council declared almost 41 percent of the vote for Tito Asfura, the perennial candidate of the National Party, who received Trump’s endorsement. In second place, with almost 39 percent of the vote, was Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party, who became vice president in 2021 in an alliance with Libre, but they quickly fell out and Nasralla became an opponent in this election. In third place, with a distant 20 percent of the vote, was Moncada.

Within hours, the gap between Asfura and Nasralla would narrow to just 515 votes, with half of the votes counted, which the CNE described as a technical tie. At the National Party headquarters on Sunday, inside a small tent filled with party members, celebrations were underway. “They're leaving!” they chanted, referring to the Castro-Zelaya family and their party. A tall, burly, dark-skinned man wearing a blue National Party cap and a white shirt with rolled-up sleeves said at the foot of the tent, “My dad worked for the U.S. Embassy for ten years, and I realized that the gringos are the shit.” Trump’s backing was music to the ears of Asfura’s supporters.

The wide margin by which the two opposition candidates won has fractured the ruling party’s voice on the alleged fraud they had been proclaiming. On Monday night, at a press conference that was postponed for seven and a half hours, Moncada did not accept defeat. This was to be expected; both she and the chief of the Army Joint Chiefs of Staff have said that they will only accept the final result of 100 percent of votes counted. Moncada announced “a new stage of struggle” until December 30, the deadline for the CNE to physically tabulate the votes and release the final results of the presidential, legislative, and municipal elections. She called for the recount of thousands of ballots from polling stations where she says the biometric fingerprint system failed, but she did not make any accusations of fraud or call for protests.

Meanwhile, some 200 people, including officials, collectives, and party supporters who had come to the headquarters to hear her, shouted, “To the streets!” to demand a more decisive stance from the candidate. Observation missions had reported isolated biometric failures on Sunday, and now Libre was expanding that criticism. “Fraud, fraud, fraud!” chanted the collectives. But Moncada did not utter the word.

Other voices in the party differed, some more severe than others. “For now, the preliminary results show a trend,” Rodolfo Pastor, the Honduran-Mexican former secretary of the presidency, now distanced from the Castro-Zelaya circle as a candidate for councilor of San Pedro Sula, conceded on social media on Sunday. He redirected the discussion toward the “unprecedented interference” of the U.S. president. “We’re waking up to results that are shocking the nation and are, in a degree, at least, a reflection of what President Trump stated a few days before the elections happened,” he said Monday morning on a post-election broadcast in English on Democracy Now.

“Let's not look for culprits where there are none,” said Rasel Tomé, founder of Libre, who lost to Moncada in the March primaries and denounced irregularities in that contest, on Tuesday. “The only ones responsible for this painful defeat are those who have had the honor of leading the party and the government,” he added. Olivia Zúñiga Cáceres, a former Libre deputy and former ambassador to Cuba, whose mother, the renowned Lenca environmentalist Berta Cáceres, was murdered in 2016, spelled out her stance on Monday: “With great respect and serenity, I accept that the election results did not favor us as the Libre Party.”

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Parties and organizations such as the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CNA) have conducted their own preliminary count. “The CNA has its own system for verifying or processing records. The data that the National Anti-Corruption Commission has processed so far is similar to that of the National Electoral Council,” Cristian Nolasco, a social audit specialist at the CNA, a civil society organization, told El Faro. “The data are not exactly the same, which makes sense because the data processed by the CNA are from some areas that have not yet been processed by the CNE, because our sources are a little more diverse.”

Between election night and the following day, the National Electoral Council reported two system failures during which the Preliminary Results Transmission System, or TREP, did not update the results transmitted digitally to the CNE headquarters from the polling stations. The first occurred in the early hours of Monday morning, and the second began at noon on Monday.

Experts close to the Council believe that the system was not prepared for the traffic flows to the website that the first results on Sunday would attract. “According to the information I obtained from within the CNE to understand what is happening with the TREP, the flow of information began to enter without any problems on Sunday, when the platform began to update with the 34 percent that came out in the first count,” electoral expert Rafael Jerez told El Faro. He explained the first failure as follows: “Afterwards, the public platform where the information was being projected began to receive a number of visits to the site that exceeded what had been originally anticipated.”

In the weeks and months leading up to the election, Libre leaders insisted that the Preliminary Results Transmission System, or TREP, would be compromised. This was despite the fact that the ruling party itself, represented on the National Electoral Council by councilor Marlon Ochoa, had endorsed the terms of operation months earlier. Ochoa has accused opposition councilors of plotting fraud to manipulate the transmission system, presenting audio recordings of alleged conversations between one of the opposition councilors, a military officer, and an opposition deputy. Cossette López, the National Party councilor, says they were manipulated using artificial intelligence. But while Ochoa was encouraging the allegations of fraud, a diplomatic source and another source with contact with the electoral councilors told El Faro that the three councilors representing the major Honduran parties, including Ochoa from Libre, received official reports on the proper functioning of the TREP and knew that vulnerabilities detected in a simulation carried out on November 13 had been addressed.

“That said, the TREP did only deliver 57 percent of the results,” a diplomatic source clarified. “Better than in 2021, when it was 50 percent, but still pretty lame for such a huge investment. But I think the failures this time were due to technical or human error, rather than political trickery.”

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The preliminary results were a bucket of cold water for the ruling party. When the candidate finished her presentation on the problems with the biometric system and closed the conference, none of the ruling party’s guests at the Hotel Maya restaurant applauded. Most frowned, and a woman sitting among the group shook her head.

Before Moncada’s press conference, at 8:50 p.m., Trump fueled the government’s narrative of an opposition plot against the elections, sponsored by the White House. “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “It is imperative that the Commission finish counting the Votes,” he added. “Democracy must prevail!” Early Tuesday morning, amid the dispute over the election results, the Federal Bureau of Prisons reported that it had released former President Juan Orlando Hernández sometime on Monday, fulfilling Trump's promise to pardon an old ally convicted in 2024 in New York on drug trafficking charges.

By Tuesday, the ruling party had regrouped, although the preliminary results had not changed. “With Donald Trump’s interference and his pardon of JOH, the desperate bipartisan system is imposing an electoral coup against Rixi,” wrote Mel Zelaya, Libre coordinator, presidential advisor, and husband of President Xiomara Castro. Moncada’s campaign is managed personally by him; he vetoes press interview requests, and the party’s communications team waits and replicates his positions on social media. He added, “That’s why they resort to interference: because they can’t win fairly.”

But not only does Asfura, the candidate anointed by Trump, have a far lead over Moncada in the preliminary results; so does Nasralla, who was attacked online by the U.S. president. Nasralla had also courted his support, but Trump branded him a traitor to the Right for having allied himself with President Xiomara Castro in 2021 to become vice president. Nasralla tried to downplay the endorsement of his rival. “It’s not Trump saying that, but his communications team,” he replied hours before the election.

“I think they (Libre) want to create a scenario for leaving power, but based on the argument that it was an illegitimate process, not so much that it was a legitimate defeat in an electoral process,” says Jerez. “As long as there are difficulties from the National Electoral Council in ensuring that information continues to flow and that the final vote count moves forward, these types of allegations will gain strength.”

On Tuesday morning, tensions within the CNE flared up again when councilor Cossette López reported on X that Libre groups had shown up at the Hotel Plaza Juan Carlos, where the vote count is taking place, to boycott the press conference that was going to announce the resumption of the release of results. She says it was councilor Marlon Ochoa who refused to restart the process and who organized the collectives and some members of his office.

Ricardo Salgado, secretary of Strategic Planning for the Presidency and one of the most bellicose voices in the government, raised the tone: “We are going to defeat the Electoral Coup,” he wrote. “This woman should be imprisoned for treason,” he added, along with a photo of López. “Those who so eagerly cover for her should also be held accountable as accomplices to the Electoral Coup.”

A not-so-secret negotiation

More than the presidency, which by law can be announced within the month of December and likely after a long and contentious vote count, what is at stake for the three parties is the new balance of power in the National Congress. The Honduran legislature is a decisive political lever, but one with less glamour for their press conferences while they still retain the attention of the media and international observers this week. While Honduras’ political elites publicly deny that they are negotiating electoral agreements looking beyond the preliminary results, they accuse each other of doing so behind closed doors.

On Monday afternoon, while the National Party was projected to win the most seats and Libre postponed its press conference and call to take to the streets, the third force, the Liberal Party, published an image of Tito Asfura and Mel Zelaya: “Why are Tito and Mel meeting? What are they negotiating? Respect the will of the people!”

Meanwhile, in the hotel zone of Tegucigalpa, where international cooperation and political institutions are concentrated, Asfura and Nasralla arrived at the offices of the influential business association COHEP, which is also part of the national election observation. Their meetings were with the Democratic Equity Network to present the candidates with a report validating the results, confirmed Gustavo Solórzano, a member of the Electoral Consortium and president of the Honduran Bar Association. El Faro asked if COHEP had negotiated with the candidates. “COHEP does not negotiate with anyone, nor are the candidates there to negotiate anything, but rather to respect the will of the people through the elections. So I completely rule out the word negotiation,” he said. Rixi Moncada did not meet with the Network, according to Solórzano, because “I don't think she was invited; she is always called and almost never answers messages.”

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Asfura left COHEP at 4 p.m. and left quickly without answering any questions. Nasralla arrived an hour later. While awaiting the results, El Faro asked Nasralla what negotiations for governance he was holding within the Liberal Party, historically a swing party that lent him the presidential ticket, with whom he maintains a tense balance. “We have not held any negotiations; we are waiting for the final result of the National Electoral Council’s count,” he replied in the hallway. He immediately clarified: “I have not had a meeting with anyone from other parties, only from our party.”

El Faro sent messages and called Manuel Zelaya and Enrique Reina, former foreign minister and Moncada’s running mate. For the National Party, El Faro sent a message to María Antonieta Mejía, presidential appointee from Tito Asfura’s inner circle. Each was asked on Monday afternoon what negotiations their party was conducting with its opponents for the governance of the country. None responded.

At the Hotel Maya, minutes before meeting Nasralla at the business leaders’ headquarters, El Faro also witnessed the departure of a Libre leader and member of Xiomara Castro’s cabinet, Deputy Foreign Minister Gerardo Torres, from an isolated floor of the hotel that housed the Liberal Party’s operations and logistics center, where Nasralla also worked between Sunday and Monday. Torres arrived with a group of companions. On that same floor, the day before, some 200 people from the Liberal Party had gathered in the auditorium to hear Nasralla speak about the preliminary results.

El Faro was able to speak with three diplomats accredited in Honduras of different ranks and with different levels of access, an election observer, two opposition deputies, and one from Libre. These sources conclude that negotiations on alliances in Congress are underway at different levels, from the formal leadership of the parties to unofficial leaders, as in the case of businesspeople. For Libre, this means preserving influence despite the unfavorable preliminary results. “If Libre does not negotiate, they will be left with exile or prison,” said an opposition lawmaker who is familiar with the political scene and who says he is certain that negotiations are being promoted by various levels of the party leadership.

This lawmaker and the three diplomats were clear that there would be negotiations to avoid unrest or a rupture like the one that occurred in 2009, when Zelaya suffered a coup d’état. What is unclear is what is being negotiated and which alliance will be the winner. “Libre must seek both, as it has the most to lose,” said a senior diplomatic official. The most likely alliances are those between Libre and one of the winners, but that could take a month to resolve. Until Monday, negotiating was still a dirty word in the Honduran public arena.

The most powerful party at the moment is the National Party, not only because it has Trump’s support, but also because it is projected to have a majority in Congress, with up to 50 votes. If this is the case, and Libre manages to secure more than 30, an alliance is possible. The Liberal Party, second in legislative votes, could only achieve the 86 votes required for a qualified majority by agreement with the National Party. Without building that bridge, the Liberals could only achieve a simple majority of around 65 votes in a possible alliance with their former ally, Libre.

It is unclear what impact Juan Orlando Hernández’s release from prison will have, whether he will return to Honduras, or whether he will arrive this month, which should end with a president-elect. But the irony remains that Xiomara Castro came to the presidency in 2021 together with Nasralla, who compensated for their ideological differences with a pact to remove Hernández and the National Party from power. The CNE seems far from declaring a presidential winner, but it is Hernández and Trump who appear to be the winners.

By law, the CNE has up to 30 days to give final results, until December 30. If the public outcry persists and attempts at a negotiated solution fail, the scenario of an escalation in the streets is likely. This already happened in 2017, with a wider margin, when JOH declared himself the winner over Nasralla by a narrow margin of 1.53 percent. Amid that electoral fraud, the Hernández government imposed a ten-day national curfew, while police and military forces repressed protests, leaving 34 dead and approximately 1,500 detained.