TEGUCIGALPA (Reuters) – Hondurans headed to the polls on Sunday to select a brand new president, with leftist candidate Xiomara Castro hoping to oust the right-wing Nationwide Social gathering, whose 12-year rule has been beset by graft scandals, persistent unemployment and waves of fleeing migrants.
If she wins, Castro would turn into the nation’s first lady president and would mark the left’s return to energy for the primary time since her husband former President Manuel Zelaya was deposed in a 2009 coup.
She has gained favor from voters for her efforts to consolidate opposition to outgoing President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who has denied accusations of getting ties to highly effective gangs, amongst different corruption scandals. Current voter surveys bolstered her standing as favourite to win.
The election is the most recent political flashpoint in Central America, a serious supply of U.S.-bound migrants and key transit level for drug trafficking, and the place considerations over more and more authoritarian governments have grown.
Castro’s primary rival is the Nationwide Social gathering’s Nasry Asfura, a rich businessman and two-term mayor of the capital Tegucigalpa who has tried to distance himself from the unpopular incumbent.
Hernandez’s disputed 2017 reelection, and its ugly aftermath, looms giant over Sunday’s vote.
Large-spread reviews of irregularities provoked lethal protests claiming the lives of over two dozen folks, however Hernandez’s election win was finally rubber-stamped by allies on the electoral council. Days later, it was vouched for by the federal government of then-U.S. President Donald Trump.
A lot of nationwide and worldwide election observers are set to observe Sunday’s voting, together with an 80-person delegation from the Washington-based Group of American States led by former Costa Rican President Luis Guillermo Solis.
“The voice of the Honduran folks have to be revered and the method should not result in acts of violence,” Solis advised Reuters.
Some 5.2 million Hondurans are eligible to vote.
The pre-election pressure was displaying in some Tegucigalpa neighborhoods late Saturday, as some companies boarded up storefront home windows, and a minimum of two auto dealerships situated in an space close to the president’s places of work had emptied their a lot of vehicles. The neighborhood has been the scene of raucous protests up to now.
Since major elections in March, political violence has already claimed 31 lives, together with native candidates and activists throughout all three main events: Castro’s Libre Social gathering, the Nationwide Social gathering, in addition to the centrist Liberal Social gathering.
The latter was as soon as a part of a long-standing two-party duopoly together with the Nationwide Social gathering, however has fallen to a distant third place in most polls. It is presidential candidate is Yani Rosenthal, a former cupboard minister who solely lately returned to Honduras after serving a three-year jail time period in america after pleading responsible to cash laundering.
Along with the presidential race, voters are additionally deciding the composition of the nation’s 128-member unicameral Congress, plus officers for some 300 native governments.
Polls open at 7 a.m. and shut at 5 p.m however could possibly be prolonged one hour relying on strains. Preliminary outcomes are anticipated round 9 p.m.
(Reporting by David Alire Garcia and Gustavo Palencia; Enhancing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
