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Bloomberg
Honduran opposition leader Salvador Nasralla says he’s a moderate, pro-US candidate who Washington is wrong to fear, as he demands a full recount of ballots in a disputed election that has plunged the central American nation into its worst crisis in nearly a decade. Nasralla says he is a moderate who the US government has mistakenly branded a radical. This has led them to throw their weight behind his opponent, President Juan Orlando Hernandez, he said.
“The United States doesn’t want me to be president,†Nasralla said in a phone interview from Tegucigalpa. “They know I won the election but they won’t accept it because they are afraid that my government will be a leftist one.â€
Election officials said that Hernandez maintains his narrow lead in the Nov. 26 vote, after they finished a special review of ballots from 4,753 voting centers.
With just over 50,000 votes separating the candidates, and with Nasralla alleging fraud, remarks from Washington and from foreign election monitors are likely to carry great weight in the coming days, as Hondurans try to gauge whether the winner is legitimate.
The electoral authority said it won’t declare a winner until it has conducted further reviews of challenges to the result. Nasralla said he won’t accept the result until a recount is conducted of every ballot cast in all the country’s 18,103 voting centers.