Nearly a week after the general elections, Honduras still does not have an elected president. Its inhabitants do not yet know who will be their new president due to a tight race, led by a few votes difference between the conservative candidate Nasry Asfura, supported by U.S. President Donald Trump, and the also conservative Salvador Nasralla, who has multiplied his denunciations of irregularities. With 88.02% of the tallied sheets, Asfura, from the National Party, was still leading with 1,132,321 votes (40.19%), while Nasralla, from the Liberal Party, had 1,112,570 (39.49%), a trend that has been maintained since Thursday, according to the preliminary official results of the National Electoral Council (CNE). The candidate for Libertad y Refundación (Libre, left), Rixi Moncada, with aspirations to be the successor to Honduras' first female president, Xiomara Castro, remains in a distant third place with 543,675 ballots (19.30%). The CNE, which is made up of three councilors representing the National, Liberal, and Libre parties, also registered today that of the 16,858 tallied sheets, at least 14,451 are 'correct,' while 2,407 present 'inconsistencies,' which will imply a vote-by-vote recount. At the CNE's vote counting center, 2,571 sheets are still pending entry, out of a total of 19,152. Salvador Nasralla, the presidential candidate for the conservative Liberal Party, stated today on his social networks that, pending electoral sheets to be entered into the vote counting center, he would be ahead by 40,000 votes over his opponent Asfura. He added that 755 sheets from the Cortés department are missing - where he claims he wins the elections -, 294 pending to be entered, and 461 that were 'maliciously' ruled as inconsistent. Asfura, for his part, called on Thursday for 'serenity' and to respect the course of the process, highlighting the civic behavior of the population. 'The stability of the country is above any personal ambition. I ask for serenity, it's a matter of time, the CNE will give the final results,' he stressed on his social networks. From the day of the general elections, the electoral body has up to 30 days to announce the final results. Today's day has passed with relative calm, although with repeated denunciations of irregularities, calls for serenity, and the expectation of Hondurans to know the final results, which could be ready before Christmas, according to CNE projections.
