Doug Specht considers Honduras’ recent election and the erosion of sovereignty within the nation’s borders
Nearly two weeks after Hondurans cast their ballots in a closely contested presidential election on 30 November, 2025, their nation remains in constitutional limbo. No official winner has been declared. The vote count is stalled. International observers praise the peaceful conduct of voting whilst simultaneously documenting the institutional paralysis that has gripped the country.
Yet the immediate question of who will be Honduras’s next president obscures a far deeper geographical and geopolitical issue: the erosion of sovereignty in a Central American nation caught between competing interventions and its own institutional fragmentation.
Enjoying this article? Check out our related reads…
The election result itself hangs in the balance. Conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, endorsed by US president Donald Trump, currently holds a narrow lead over centrist Salvador Nasralla with roughly 40 per cent of the vote each, while the ruling leftist LIBRE party’s Rixi Moncada trails with approximately 19 per cent. Yet approximately 14.5 per cent of tally sheets contain inconsistencies, and the National Electoral Council (CNE) has repeatedly halted the publication of results, citing technical problems and security breaches.
The parallels to Honduras’s 2017 election crisis are haunting. Eight years ago, opposition candidate Nasralla held a commanding lead through election night. Then the vote-counting system mysteriously crashed, and when it came back online, incumbent Juan Orlando Hernández had somehow moved ahead.
The Organisation of American States called for a new election; the United States did not. Hernández was declared the winner. Within days, Honduras witnessed a military curfew, mass protests, police violence, and at least two dozen deaths, a violence that persisted for years as opposition activists faced targeted killings and disappearances.
Honduras’s electoral dysfunction is not accidental; it is structural. Since 2019, electoral authority has been divided between the Electoral Justice Tribunal and the CNE, each led by three partisan representatives, one from each of the National, Liberal, and LIBRE parties. This design ensures that no consequential decision can be made without consensus amongst parties with fundamentally opposed interests. It is institutionalised deadlock.
Geopolitical subordination and the 2009 coup
This institutional decay cannot be separated from Honduras’s history of geopolitical subordination. The 2009 military coup that removed democratically elected President Manuel Zelaya was enabled by the United States, which declined to formally label it a coup, a designation that would have triggered mandatory aid cutoffs. Subsequent investigations revealed that high-level US military officials met with coup plotters the night before the takeover.
The coup cleared the way for over a decade of neoliberal governance that prioritised foreign investment, special economic zones, and land expropriation at the expense of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, particularly the Garifuna peoples, who saw ancestral territories seized for tourism development and agricultural export.
The current election crisis occurs in this context of structural vulnerability. In November 2023, Honduras made the sovereign decision to shift diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China, seeking to diversify its economic partnerships and access Chinese financing for infrastructure. This rational exercise of foreign policy autonomy provoked deep concern in Washington and constitutes part of the backdrop to the 2025 electoral turbulence.
Trump’s intervention in the 2025 election has been extraordinary even by the standards of U.S. involvement in Central American politics. He openly endorsed Asfura, threatening that if his preferred candidate lost, the United States would ‘refrain from wasting resources on a misguided leader’. He explicitly threatened to cut US aid, a sum exceeding $193million annually, representing roughly one-quarter of Honduras’s GDP through remittances alone.
Two days before the election, Trump announced that he would pardon former President Juan Orlando Hernández, a member of Asfura’s National Party serving a 45-year sentence for cocaine trafficking. The pardon was signed on December 1 and Hernández was released from prison just as the counting stalled, an act that international observers described as calculated electoral interference.
Trump’s ally Roger Stone subsequently revealed that he had lobbied for the pardon, claiming such a gesture would invigorate the National Party before the election. This was interference reduced to its rawest form: a foreign power openly leveraging its economic dominance and judicial authority to shape a neighbouring country’s electoral outcome.
A deepening crisis
Honduras, a nation whose economic structures remain fundamentally shaped by historical colonialism and subsequent U.S. dominance, whose small size and geographic position make it vulnerable to external pressure, whose political institutions were further weakened by the 2009 U.S.-enabled coup, cannot muster the institutional autonomy to resist such pressure.
When the Trump administration stated on December 9 that the election had been conducted fairly and that there was no credible evidence to warrant annulment, this was precisely calibrated reassurance to the candidate it had endorsed while simultaneously contradicting Trump’s own earlier fraud allegations.
Yet the crisis also reveals how institutional decay creates opportunities for both internal manipulation and external leverage. With no functional consensus mechanism, the CNE cannot act decisively. When the permanent commission of Congress declared on December 10 that it would not validate election results it deemed tainted by “interference of the United States President Donald Trump,” Honduras entered uncharted constitutional territory. Legally, it is unclear whether Congress has this authority. Practically, it signals that the highest legislative body views the electoral process as compromised.
Sovereignty and democratic resilience
A small Central American nation with a population of 10 million cannot easily resist the leverage of a superpower from which flow essential resources and remittances. Its institutional frameworks, weakened by a coup enabled by external actors, cannot deliver on democracy’s basic requirements. Its electoral bodies are structured for paralysis rather than resolution.
Honduras is waiting for election results. But it is also waiting for its institutions to recover their independence, for its sovereignty to be respected, and for the international community, particularly the United States, to distinguish between observing elections and controlling them. Without addressing these deeper geographical and geopolitical realities, the country will find itself repeating this crisis in four years’ time.
The question is not who will be Honduras’s next president. The question is whether Honduras will recover the institutional autonomy to determine its own answer to that question.
