Honduran President Xiomara Castro has ordered a recount of last year’s presidential election on Saturday, despite an official review that was made by the nation’s National Electoral Council (CNE) that declared the conservative candidate, Nasry Asfura, the election’s official winner.
Castro, representing Honduras’ left-wing LIBRE Party, criticized the nation’s electoral body on X, writing the CNE has “unjustifiably refused to conduct the scrutiny of 4,774 minutes, which represent the vote of 1,558,689 citizens in the three electoral levels.”
The Honduran president and wife to former President Manuel Zelaya also added:
“This omission usurps popular sovereignty, by disregarding without legal cause the vote of more than one million Hondurans who went to the polls. It constitutes a serious violation of the Constitution of the Republic, which I am obligated to comply with and defend until the last day of my term, which ends as the Constitution mandates.”
The Honduran election, which was held on November 30, 2025, was labeled with a cast of skepticism from the very beginning, with candidates calling foul, accusing their challengers of “fraud and abuse”, alleging widespread “inconsistencies” on thousands of voting ballots.
The conservative candidate and U.S.-backed Asfura, who felt a last-minute push from President Trump, which effectively flipped the race on its head, led the centrist candidate Salvador Nasralla to declare foreign interference on the part of the Trump administration, stating, “It hurt me because I was winning by a much larger margin.”
Rixi Moncada, Castro’s named successor, has also backed claims of U.S. foreign interference. Moncada filed a legal motion in December that requested the initial annulment of the November election, kickstarting an “official scrutiny” process.
In mid-December, the CNE began the official scrutiny of the election results in an effort to flush out any “inconsistencies” in response to the allegations from candidates, and eventually re-validated Asfura as the confirmed winner.
However, Saturday’s presidential decree by Castro ordering another recount mandates an additional review of some 19,000 tally sheets.
Although the decree does not outline a timeline for the election review, Castro states that if the CNE does not comply with the decree, the Honduran National Congress will ultimately be responsible for the process.
Amid Honduras’ troubled history of disruptions in the transfer of executive authority, the Chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Roosevelt Leonel Hernández Aguilar has repeatedly vowed to facilitate an “orderly transition and alternation of power” and remains committed to enforcing the official results declared by the CNE.
President Xiomara Castro’s term officially ends on Jan. 27, 2026.
