Honduras - Xiomara Castro’s election
The vote count is slow as backroom negotiations are ongoing, but Honduras is on its way to electing a new president
Reminder: One last opportunity to sign up for the Mexico training I’m holding this Thursday, 2 December, at noon EST. https://events.zoom.us/e/view/Y6fdeyInQd6KrurTV-f9Qw
Honduras’s electoral authorities have counted about half the votes, demonstrating a 20 point lead for Xiomara Castro over Nasry Asfura. Now the vote counting has stalled. As I wrote last week, transitions from quasi-authoritarian systems like the one run by Hernandez always involve some sort of informal negotiation that goes beyond the simple counting of votes. Castro has significant leverage given her apparent margin of victory, but Hernandez is still going to do his best to maintain influence and find ways to benefit allies plus avoid criminal prosecution.
Watch for a piñata. Hernandez still has time in government and a relatively favorable Congress. He can hand out long term positions including those for the Central Bank, issue infrastructure contracts and concessions, and privatize or otherwise manipulate various government entities. Hernandez’s allies want pork and Hernandez has an opportunity to limit what Castro can do once she takes control.
The congressional elections remain a fight. The National Party probably can’t steal the presidency at this point, but they can steal a few seats in Congress. Libre will fight it. There are some contentious battles coming up regarding the vote counting of the congressional elections.
The head of Honduras’s business community has congratulated Castro. That is a good sign for a likely transition and a smart play by the business community to not delay their recognition of the new government.
There were lots of factors in the Castro win. Let me highlight three:
A unified opposition. Had Nasralla continued running separately, the opposition to the National Party would have failed to consolidate and Asfura would have won. It’s impossible to prove a hypothetical, but I feel fairly confident about this one.
Massive turnout. Turnout was around 57% in 2017 and nearly 68% in last weekend’s election. It’s true that some of that increase came due to changes in the voter lists, but the lines last Sunday were proof of heavier turnout than usual. That 10% shift in turnout is the margin that ensures that the National Party cannot steal this year’s elections. When fighting an authoritarian regime, getting more voters participating is always a better strategy than abstention.
Anti-incumbency and economics. The region remains in an anti-incumbent environment and that has been enhanced as citizens are upset about inflation. Separate from all of the Honduras-specific factors, that is one message to take away regionally.
Castro isn’t Zelaya; Honduras 2021 isn’t Honduras 2010
The 2009 coup was a major political rupture that increased organized crime and corruption, but nobody should pretend that Honduras was doing great prior to the coup. The fact Mel Zelaya was overthrown in a coup and followed by several awful, corrupt and authoritarian-leaning presidents doesn’t negate the fact that Mel Zelaya was an awful, corrupt and authoritarian-leaning president himself.
There is a temptation to analyze Castro as if her presidency will be a renewal of Zelaya’s mandate 12 years later. She and her husband add to that narrative by sometimes speaking as if her election is a belated repudiation of the coup. But Castro deserves an opportunity to succeed or fail on her own. Where Zelaya fits formally and informally in the administration matters, but he isn’t president. Additionally, Honduras today has gone through a lot since the 2009 coup, most of it bad, that requires a very different set of policies than the ones Zelaya wanted to implement more than a decade ago.
The relationship between the new president and her husband is complicated and quite different from other recent ruling couples in the hemisphere (the Ortega family in Nicaragua and the Kirchners in Argentina). Castro has a coalition of allies, some of whom fall under her husband’s influence and others who clash strongly against him. Zelaya controls a significant portion of the Libre Party machine and is influential among that base of voters at the center of the Castro campaign, but the 50% of the vote that Castro won came from a broad anti-Hernandez coalition, many of whom dislike and distrust Zelaya.
There is a fair amount of attention on how Honduras’s relationship with Venezuela and China may evolve under Castro, particularly given Zelaya’s affinity to the late Hugo Chavez. While interesting from a geopolitics perspective, it played essentially zero role in why Honduran voters chose to kick out the ruling party. Citizens will measure Castro’s presidency on her results on security, economics and anti-corruption while the issues of China and Venezuela will have minimal domestic impact.
Xiomara Castro's three biggest challenges are unwinding the captured criminal state, obtaining control of the fully pro-Hernandez security forces, and stabilizing the budget. The US can and should play a role in assisting all three of those items should Castro be open to cooperation.
In terms of unwinding the state capture, Castro has promised to bring in a UN anti-corruption team as part of her opening agenda. It’s a good plan and should receive international support. However, this always has the potential to backfire given how many of Castro’s own allies have been linked to corruption in the past.
I’ll have more to say about the challenges moving forward in a future newsletter.