Latin America’s Rightward Drift Accelerates as Trump-Backed Candidate Wins in Honduras
“Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
The rightward political realignment in Latin America continued as Nasry “Tito” Asfura, the Trump-endorsed National Party of Honduras candidate, was declared the winner of Honduras’s presidential election on Wednesday, more than three weeks after votes were cast.
After a protracted vote-counting process, marked by technical glitches and allegations of fraud, Asfura, 67, defeated his Liberal Party of Honduras rival, Salvador Nasralla, 72, by a narrow margin of 40.3 percent to 39.5 percent. LIBRE candidate Rixi Moncada finished a distant third.
Fox News reported:
The results of the race were so tight and the ballot processing system was so chaotic, that about 15% of the tally sheets, which accounted for hundreds of thousands of ballots, had to be counted by hand to determine the winner.
Celebrations erupted across Honduras after Trump-backed Nasry Asfura was declared the winner of the presidential election. pic.twitter.com/oqasmskCDe
— New York Post (@nypost) December 25, 2025
Asfura’s supporters, including President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, were obviously delighted by the final outcome.
The people of Honduras have spoken: Nasry Asfura is Honduras’ next president. The United States congratulates President-Elect @titoasfura @papialaordenh and looks forward to working with his administration to advance prosperity and security in our hemisphere.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) December 24, 2025
But many Nasralla backers are questioning, and in some cases rejecting, the results.
Chief among them is Honduran Congress President Luis Redondo, who considers Asfura’s victory an “electoral coup.” He said, “This is completely outside the law. It has no value.”
In the video below, released on Wednesday, Redondo expressed his concern that “those who call themselves observer missions remain silent.”
Their silence, he said, should be viewed as “political submission to the dominance and pressure exerted by Donald Trump and the sectors that currently back him.”
➪“Resulta preocupante el silencio de quienes se hacen llamar misiones observadoras, un silencio que no puede entenderse como neutralidad, sino como sumisión política frente al dominio y la presión ejercida por Donald Trump y los sectores que hoy lo respaldan. Cuando una misión… pic.twitter.com/PfL6yi1kJv
— Cesia Mejía (@CesiaMejiaHN) December 23, 2025
The election was held on Sunday, November 30. Fox reported that preliminary results the next day showed Asfura ahead of Nasrallah by two points, 41% to 39%.
Quickly, however, Asfura’s lead had vanished and the race became a virtual tie.
Two days after the election, the National Electoral Council announced that “technical problems” with the website tallying vote totals had caused it to crash, according to The Associated Press.
Trump reacted to the announcement on Truth Social at the time: “Looks like Honduras is trying to change the results of their Presidential Election. If they do, there will be hell to pay!”
The next three weeks saw bitter recriminations between all of the parties involved — in fact, much like we’ve grown accustomed to here in the US!
Asfura, a former mayor of Tegucigalpa with a strong reputation for leadership, campaigned on “infrastructure, public order and efficiency,” as per Fox.
Trump endorsed Asfura days before Hondurans went to the polls. He wrote on Truth Social, “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad.”
Fox reported that before the polls opened, Trump announced his pardon of former President Juan Orlando Hernandez, a former National Party of Honduras leader, who was serving a 45-year sentence in the U.S. for drug trafficking and conspiracy.
Asfura’s victory is only the latest example of a broader shift toward right-leaning and conservative leadership across Latin America.
Earlier this month, “ultra-conservative” candidate José Antonio Kast won a landslide victory in Chile’s presidential election. His conservative administration will be a major departure from that of the country’s current socialist President Gabriel Boric.
PBS reported:
Chilean voters overwhelmingly embraced his pledge to crack down on increased crime, deport hundreds of thousands of immigrants without legal status and revive the sluggish economy of one of Latin America’s most stable and prosperous nations.
In October, Bolivian voters elected conservative Rodrigo Paz as president, ending nearly two decades of socialist rule.
Earlier this year, Ecuadorian voters reelected President Daniel Noboa (who first won office in 2023). Noboa’s presidency followed years of left-wing governance in the South American country.
In El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele, who first won the presidency in 2019, was reelected in a landslide victory in February 2024. His hard-right, law-and-order agenda remains very popular among El Salvadorans.
And no list would be complete without mentioning Argentina’s election of President Javier Milei in December 2023, a conservative who defied the odds. When he took office, Argentina’s economy was in a severe crisis. Among the country’s many problems, decades of Peronist policy had driven inflation to more than 200% and the poverty rate to 40%. Milei’s governance has been transformative for the nation’s economy.
The embrace of conservative candidates by Latin American voters reflects growing frustration with inflation, crime, and corruption. Increasingly, voters are backing leaders who promise tougher security measures, market-friendly economic reforms, and a decisive break with entrenched political elites.
While the region remains politically diverse and cyclical swings are common, the recent pattern suggests a broader realignment, with voters in several countries prioritizing security and economic stability, over traditional left-wing platforms.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Comments
with corruption built into the dna of south american politics ( no different than north american..or the world). the msm is sharpening their fangs to connect djt personally to any and all mis-steps
but will take the friendships when we can
maybe candunce owens can run a country down there
Ahh, looks like they finally gave up and released the results they couldn’t cheat their way past.
BREAKING NEWS: Federal District Judge J. Boasberg orders the Consejo Nacional Electoral to immediately accept and start counting 32,471,809 ballots without signatures that were just discovered in an unmonitored ballot drop-box in San Francisco, CA.
He can order whatever he likes. They don’t have to obey him.
It would not surprise me to see a left wing organization file a federal law suit challenging the voting results in Honduras. Their claim will be that the President somehow interfered in the vote count. Judge Boasberg will assign the case to himself and will sign a TRO saying that the US cannot recognize the Honduran President as legitimate.
Obviously you’re joking, but if he were to do that it would be the perfect opportunity for Trump to get back at him, because it would be so clearly ultra vires that no one could dispute Trump’s right to publicly tell him where to shove his order. It wouldn’t even be arguably valid. So Trump could make a test case of it, and put him in his place.
” . . . voters are backing leaders who promise tougher security measures, market-friendly economic reforms, and a decisive break with entrenched political elites.”
Uh, so they are backing leaders in the mold of DJT? Awesome.