For Immediate Release: December 2, 2025
Washington, DC — The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) urged patience and restraint ― including from President Trump and US government officials ― as Honduras’s electoral authority continues to count votes from the November 30 general election. Preliminary results announced yesterday showed a very close finish between presidential candidate Nasry Asfura of the hard-right National Party and center-right Salvador Nasralla of the Liberal Party.
“The statements of President Trump, including that Honduras would harm relations with the United States if they chose a different candidate than the one he prefers, are an intervention that violates the Charter of the Organization of the American States, which the US has signed,” CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot said. “Other statements from US officials such as Congresswoman Maria Salazar, who praised the military coup that overthrew the democratically elected President of Honduras, Mel Zelaya, in 2009, and in recent weeks has questioned the credibility of this election, are also destabilizing and violate international norms.”
President Trump intervened again yesterday in Honduras’s electoral processes by pressuring, in a Truth Social post, for the electoral authorities not to “change the results” and for the National Electoral Commission [sic] to “finish counting the Votes.” Prior to Trump’s post, the National Electoral Council (CNE) announced results from its preliminary results system, the TREP, showing that with 57 percent of the preliminary results counted there was a “technical tie” between Asfura (39.91 percent) and Nasralla (39.89 percent), separated by just over 500 votes.
Prior to election day, Trump issued a statement endorsing Asfura and denouncing his opponents Nasralla and governing party candidate Rixi Moncada, so his reference to “changing the results,” and a reference to the CNE “abruptly stopp[ing] counting at midnight on November 30th” have widely been interpreted as a call for Asfura to be declared the winner. In the pre-election post, Trump also wrote: “I cannot work with Moncada and the Communists, and Nasralla is not a reliable partner for Freedom, and cannot be trusted,” and also made it clear that if Asfura did not win, the US would be at odds with the government of Honduras, a country highly dependent on US trade and remittances.
In the same message, Trump announced he would be pardoning former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving a 45-year prison sentence after a US court found him guilty of involvement in major drug trafficking to the US. Asfura is from the same party as Hernández, who was released from prison yesterday. During his two contested mandates (2014–2022), Hernández was linked to corruption scandals and widespread human rights abuses perpetrated by state security forces. His 2017 reelection was widely seen as fraudulent, and the Organization of American States published a statistical analysis concluding that Hernández did not win the election legitimately.
The TREP provides an unofficial, preliminary quick count of election results. Under Honduran law, the CNE has 30 days to count and verify election results. The CNE president has called for calm and patience given the tightness of the race. The CNE also acknowledged technical problems with its results transmission software, something CEPR observers warned about on election day.
Ahead of voting on November 30, CEPR cautioned: “Premature declarations of victory based on potentially unrepresentative TREP results — or efforts to pressure the CNE into making such announcements — risk delegitimizing the final results and provoking unrest and violence. It is essential to remember that TREP results are preliminary and non-binding.”
Prior to Trump’s post, the State Department had called for “continued patience while waiting for the CNE’s official results,” noting: “The results are preliminary and the process needs to continue until finalized.”
“Trump has already interfered, undoubtedly with some impact on Honduras’s elections, with his endorsement of Asfura, his denunciations of Nasralla and Moncada, and his threat to take actions that would be seen as likely to cause economic harm to Honduras and its people, if another candidate were to win,” Weisbrot said. “Republican Members of Congress, some of whom then traveled to Honduras as ‘election observers,’ also made public statements that would be expected to undermine the credibility of the election and its results. US officials and other foreign actors should cease their interference and allow the Honduran electoral authorities to carry out their duties and respect the will of Honduran voters.”
CEPR had observers on the ground during Honduras’s November 30 elections.
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