Xiomara Castro making the victory sign and surrounded by supporters during the Sunday Dec. 1 march in Tegucigalpa against alleged electoral fraud. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Thelma Mejía
TEGUCIGALPA, Dec 3 2013 (IPS)

The recent elections which were expected to strengthen the fabric of governance in Honduras failed to do so. Now the country has a president-elect with just 38.7 percent support who is facing accusations of electoral fraud, along with a fragmented parliament where the governing party will be in the minority.

“It won’t be easy for Juan Orlando [Hernández], his task is going to be complicated, he’ll have to negotiate,” university student Juan Sánchez told IPS, referring to the candidate of the governing right-wing National Party (PN), who was declared winner of the Nov. 24 elections.

Sánchez was watching from the sidelines as thousands of demonstrators marched through the streets of Tegucigalpa, the capital, on Sunday Dec. 1, to protest the alleged fraud.

They were called out by the left-wing Libre party, whose candidate, Xiomara Castro, 58, took 28.7 percent of the vote, according to the electoral tribunal.

“I don’t know if there was fraud, I’m not sure about that. But I do know that the PN government will be tough on the people, and that it’s good it won’t have a majority in Congress; I hope the different political forces balance each other out,” Sánchez commented.

He said he has been looking for work for a year and in the meantime is scraping by on the commissions he earns from selling cosmetics.

As a warm-up for Jan. 27, when Hernández will take office, the supporters of Castro and her husband – the head of the Libre party former president Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted by a coup in 2009 – marched through the capital.

They were demanding a vote-by-vote recount due to supposed irregularities such as altered tally sheets, the inclusion of dead people on the voter rolls, and inadequate monitoring of polling stations.

Castro, Zelaya and their followers marched to the electoral tribunal warehouse where the votes are counted. The candidate and her husband rode in a pickup truck carrying the coffin and body of José Antonio Ardón, the leader of the fleet of motorcyclists who have headed Libre’s marches since the coup. Ardón was kidnapped and murdered the day before the demonstration.

Although the leaders of Libre say his death was politically motivated, they have no evidence.

The authorities are investigating his murder, which happened in one of the most dangerous neighbourhoods of Tegucigalpa, the capital of this country that has one of the highest murder rates in the world, according to United Nations figures.

“They mounted a fraud against us, they dealt us a technical, democratic blow, but this struggle isn’t over,” Castro said in a passionate speech. “I am the president-elect of Honduras, and today’s demonstration is a clear message for those who took part in the fraud.”

Zelaya talked about filing a legal challenge. But he also said that “it is on the streets where peaceful revolutionary processes emerge; soon we will bring them down and win political power.”

The electoral tribunal said it would look at the tallies from thousands of polling booths, but it stopped short of agreeing to a full recount.

Another university student, Waleska Zavala, who took part in Sunday’s protest, said she did believe “bad things happened in the elections; they stole the elections from us, but they did it with kid gloves, so it’s difficult to prove.”

In her view, “Libre should now prepare itself to be in the opposition, because one thing I can tell you: the people have changed, and with them we young people,” she told IPS while tying her party’s trademark scarf around her forehead.?

That change, according to Aquiles Uclés, a driver for a private company, should involve social inclusion and coverage.

“If the new government wants to change things, it will have to live up to its promises, which are jobs and security; it will have to govern for everyone, and not just for the rich,” he told IPS.

Political analyst Miguel Cálix said Hernández won’t find it so difficult to govern because “they already knew what was coming and they began to forge alliances from the presidency of Congress, where Hernández reached important decisions with the consensus of the different blocs of legislators, even though they had a parliamentary majority.”

Hernández, 45, was president of the single-chamber Congress until June, when he threw himself into his campaign. “He is an astute, skilled politician, and as far as I know he’s already negotiating to be able to count on a majority in Congress,” Cálix told IPS. “In the executive his performance will be sound, and there will be reforms and a high level of social concern,” he predicted.

One of the novel aspects of the elections was that the brand-new Libre party became the main opposition force, pushing aside the moderate right-wing Liberal Party (PL), which has traditionally alternated in power with the PN.

But expert in electoral issues Adán Palacios said the effort to forge alliances should be ongoing.

“We are facing the need for electoral reforms that would usher in a second round of voting, which should not be delayed, now that Honduras has moved from a two-party system to a multi-coloured political map,” he told IPS.

Palacios said that power is increasingly shifting from the executive branch to the legislature, “and with this atypical Congress made up of many political forces, where the PN will not be in the majority, other scenarios guaranteeing better governance, such as a second round of elections, should be tried out.”

But sociologist Mirna Flores told IPS that a run-off would be costly for a poor country like Honduras. “In theory it’s feasible, but governance problems here should be solved with more sustainable policies and real responses to structural problems like poverty, health, education, inequality, unemployment and insecurity.”

In the new 128-member Congress, the PN will hold 48 seats, Libre 39, the PL 25, the centre-right Anticorruption Party 13, and three small parties will hold one seat each.

This panorama is very different from the one faced by outgoing President Porfirio Lobo, who had 71 legislators – a big enough majority to reform the constitution and introduce the possibility of holding referendums and plebiscites, and to impeach political office-holders.

The reforms were aimed at responding to some of the demands voiced by the people after the coup that toppled Zelaya and sparked a major institutional crisis, as well as to requirements set by the international community in order to recognise the Lobo administration after he was elected four years ago, within a difficult process of stabilisation that was to be crowned by the Nov. 24 elections.

Hernández, as president of Congress, played a key role in drumming up support for the reforms, which required the votes of 81 legislators. He also managed to build broad backing for the removal of Constitutional Court and Supreme Court judges and for the replacement of the heads of the prosecution service and other government departments, which the PN now controls.

Honduras’ electoral tribunal has declared Juan Orlando Hernández the clear winner of the country’s presidential elections, despite persisting allegations of fraud from the opposition candidate.

Figures from 81.5 percent of polling stations tallied by Wednesday gave Hernández, a conservative, 35.88 percent of the vote, compared to 29.14 percent for his rival, Xiomara Castro.

The electoral tribunal said Hernández’s lead was insurmountable.

“These numbers that we released today clearly indicate that the winner of the general election is Juan Orlando Hernández,” said David Matamoros, president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal.

“In the coming days, we will issue the official declaration, once we have added the records that are needed.”

Castro has accused the Supreme Electoral Tribunal of manipulating 19 percent of the votes, in order to favour Hernández. Her campaign has called for massive protests over the alleged fraud.

“On Saturday, we are going to summon people to protest. The Libre [Party] and Xiomara [Castro] have been robbed of their victory, and we are going to show it,” Castro’s husband, ex-president Manuel Zelaya, told Radio and TV Globo.

In a Twitter post on Tuesday, Castro said: “We will defend the will of the people as it was expressed at the polls.”

A struggling state

The governments of Colombia, Guatemala, Panama and Costa Rica congratulated Hernández on his victory, while Nicaragua’s leftist President Daniel Ortega also recognised Hernández as the winner.

Tensions were running high as the political standoff spread to the streets with protests by about 400 students.

On Tuesday, police beat and used tear gas against about 800 pro-Castro protesters.

About 100 police in helmets and riot gear used gas and then truncheons to beat the chanting youths.

The clash between Hernández and Castro brought new uncertainty to a country reeling from gang violence, poverty and the wounds of a 2009 coup that removed Zelaya from his seat.

In Honduras, known as one of the world’s deadliest nations, gangs run whole neighbourhoods, extorting businesses large and small.

Drug cartels have used Honduras as a transfer point for shipping illegal drugs, especially cocaine, from South America to the U.S.

Honduras is the poorest country in the Americas after Haiti, with the majority of the population living in poverty.

Published in agreement with Al Jazeera.

The unhealed wounds left by the 2009 coup in Honduras will continue to mark the campaign for the Nov. 24 elections, in which nine parties are participating, four of them new political groups, spanning a wide ideological range.

The elections will focus on two main issues, according to analysts who spoke to IPS: insecurity in the most violent country in the world, with an official homicide rate of 85.5 per 100,000 population in 2012; and the political polarisation that has resulted from the coup d’état four years ago.

Ousted president “Mel” Zelaya’s party LIBRE, with his wife Xiomara Castro as presidential candidate, is leading the polls for the November elections. Credit: Yamil Gonzales/CC BY-SA 2.0

On Jun. 28, 2009, then president Manuel Zelaya was ousted and sent out of the country on a plane, still in his pyjamas.

He is participating in the election campaign that just began, as the leader of a new party backing the presidential candidacy of his wife, Xiomara Castro, and as a congressional candidate.

The general elections, announced May 23 – according to legal regulations, six months in advance – are a novelty in that four new political parties are participating, one of them a political-military grouping and one regarded as an “outsider.”

The new arrivals are joining three traditional parties in a bid to break with the dominant two-party system that has ruled for 30 years of unstable governments, in the transition to democracy of this Central American country of more than eight million people.

David Matamoros, the president of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, said in a speech to the nation that in the interests of greater political participation, “this high court has authorised the registration of four new political parties, thereby extending the options for the Honduran electorate and advancing in the democratisation of our political system.”

The electoral spectrum is now made up of the governing rightwing National Party (PN), which has alternated in power with the conservative Liberal Party (PL) for over 100 years.

The social democratic Innovation and Unity Party, the Christian Democracy Party and the leftwing Democratic Unification Party are referred to as “bonsai” by political analysts because they have not grown in over two decades of existence.

The new arrivals on the scene are the leftwing Libertad y Refundación (LIBRE – Freedom and Refoundation Party) of former president Zelaya; the Frente Amplio Político Electoral en Resistencia (FAPER – Broad Political Electoral Front in Resistance), also of the left; the centre-right Anti-Corruption Party (PAC); and the Patriotic Alliance, a political-military project headed by Romeo Vásquez, the former armed forces commander who led the coup in 2009.

The electoral race includes major political figures who were directly involved in the 2009 political crisis, Eugenio Sosa, a sociologist and university professor, told IPS.

Among these actors, he said, were “Zelaya and his wife Castro, who are now seeking to return to government with LIBRE, and General Vásquez.”

In addition, “Juan Orlando Hernández, who was a member of Congress for PN and the spokesman for his congressional sector at the time of the coup, is now their presidential candidate; and Mauricio Villeda, the PL candidate, supported the de facto government of Roberto Micheletti,” the president of parliament at the time of the coup.

“In this campaign we will again be hearing the epithets of ‘coupmongers’ and ‘non-coupmongers,’ ‘far-right’ and ‘far-left,’ ‘pro-constituent assembly’ and ‘anti-constituent aseembly,’ among others,” Sosa predicted.

Then there is sports commentator Salvador Nasralla, presidential candidate for PAC, “whose discourse is anti-political and against the leadership, typical of a political ‘outsider’,” he said.

Sosa forecast a campaign in which ideological polarisation will characterise the debate, and insults and put-downs may be more common than constructive proposals.

Analyst Wilfredo García had a different point of view. He did not think the coup would have such a marked effect on the campaign, although he agreed the run-up to the elections would be virulent and highly ideological, since “the very existence as the hegemonic power group” of the traditional two-party system is at stake.

“Security and corruption will be the keynote campaign issues, because under the administration of President Porfirio Lobo, violence overflowed in Honduras to the point where it has become the most violent country in the world, and it is also under his government that we occupy the shameful first place for corruption in Central America,” he said.

In García’s view, the traditional parties do not have any answers and represent a culture of corruption and political patronage.

“The military’s political project should be examined closely, because they felt betrayed by the political class after the 2009 crisis and have opted to develop a movement to represent their own interests. If violence continues to increase, they may have possibilities in the future,” he said.

The first opinion polls put LIBRE in the lead for voter intentions, followed by PAC, while PN and PL alternate in third place.

But the traditionally dominant liberals and nationalists have formidable party structures, and the analysts believe they will fight tooth and nail to remain in power.

The United States embassy in Tegucigalpa issued a communiqué after the announcement of the elections, calling for the vote to be held in a climate “free of violence and intimidation.”

Latinobarómetro, a polling firm, reported that disenchantment with democracy in Honduras resulted in a 10-point drop in popular support for this form of government between 2010 and 2011. This disaffection will be put to the test in November when rupture or maintenance of the status quo in political power will be decided, the analysts said.