Honduras election scenarios - November 2025
Scenario A: Contested election. Scenario B: Contested election.
Here are my two leading scenarios for the Honduras election at the end of this month.
Scenario 1: Rixi Moncada wins the election, and her opponents claim fraud.
Scenario 2: An opposition candidate (Nasry Asfura or Salvador Nasralla) wins the election, and the ruling Libre Party claims fraud.
Which one of those scenarios is more likely? I don’t know. The polling situation in the country is awful. Fake polls abound, and the few credible polls have serious flaws. Even with great pollsters, this would be a hard election to model, with three candidates in a plurality election, high numbers of undecided and late-deciding voters, and where the effectiveness of political machines to drive turnout matters as much as voter preferences.
The prediction market odds from Polymarket and Kalshi (which are a personal obsession of the moment; see yesterday’s post on Venezuela prediction markets as well) also have an election in flux, but also very low volume. That means that they are less likely to be correct and easier for a single actor to manipulate.
And, of course, there might actually be some form of electoral shenanigans by one or all sides. So it’s complicated.
With that in mind, here are some thoughts on the upcoming election.
Honduras is very likely to see a contested election. You’ll note above that “Honduras holds an election and all sides respect the results” is not one of the expected scenarios. For the past few months, Honduras has been on a collision course with a contested election. It’s a crisis that we should all see coming. If it doesn’t happen, I’ll be happily surprised.
Election challenges rarely succeed. The person declared the winner on election night is almost always the likely next president. It does not usually matter how loudly the loser challenges, nor whether the evidence is credible or not.
Trust the election monitors if they say the election was free and fair. If the OAS election monitors say the election outcome was decided correctly, that is a good sign for the country. Election monitors have a much more difficult time dealing with contested elections. The most recent press release from the OAS election monitoring mission says that they have seen almost daily attacks against the integrity of the process coming from various sides.
The military will play a role. Honduras’s military has a constitutional role in guaranteeing the validity and security of the election process. You can imagine that having both good and bad impacts, with one of the more negative impacts being that it almost guarantees a politicized role for the institution.
At a recent press conference, the head of Honduras’s Armed Forces said the military will collect copies of the actas from every voting precinct and take them to a military base to guarantee the verification of the results. If you think the military is acting as a fair actor, that move can be seen like the Venezuelan opposition’s effort to collect voting receipts to prove they won in mid-2024. If you think the military is going to play a negative role, you can see those receipts becoming part of the election dispute that polarizes the country and places the military in the deciding role of the outcome.
Does the military side with the government or the opposition? Those who remember the 2009 coup remember a military that definitely did not like Mel Zelaya and his political movement. The National Party had control for a decade to further build out that political leaning. But President Castro has had four years to make sure the top military commanders are far more supportive of her. And there are reasons to believe the military commanders might be fair actors, trying to support the legitimate outcome. No matter what their role, in a disputed election, their actions will be seen as provocative in a region where militaries are not supposed to decide the winners.
The Congressional outcome also matters. When Xiomara Castro won by a landslide in 2021, she was also on track for a congressional majority, only to watch it break down and dissolve into an ugly leadership fight almost immediately. While we don’t have good polling on this election, it’s fair to expect that the upcoming congress will be equally or more divided and likely to turn against the president at some point.
The role of China. I’ve never seen China as involved in a Latin American election as they are in Honduras. That’s because Asfura has promised to flip recognition back to Taipei while Libre has become a staunch supporter of Beijing in Central America. The PRC support for Moncada is not too overt within the country, but it’s there and they will care about the outcome if/when this election is disputed.
The role of the US. A few months ago I told a reporter that Asfura has spent more effort campaigning to win support in the US than he has in Honduras. The National Party candidate is trying to win over the Trump administration, particularly Marco Rubio, plus the New York financial community. His strategy to win and consolidate power after the election requires the US to support him if the election is contested.
Both short-term and medium-term instability. The days after the election could see protests and political upheaval. The months following the election are likely to see continued disputes and efforts to delegitimize the winner, even if the initial chaos subsides.
This is one of those predictions I hope is wrong. I will be quite pleased if the election is free and fair, and the losing side respects the outcome. However, any analysts or companies expecting a clean, uncontested transition are planning for the exception, not the base scenarios.
