Honduran president Juan Hernandez, rival Salvador Nasralla declare themselves poll winners before official results

Tegucigalpa: Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez declared himself the winner of elections before official results were announced — and his top rival did the same. “The result is more than clear: we won this election,” Hernandez told a crowd of supporters who cheered him in the capital Tegucigalpa. Shortly after his announcement, 64-year-old Salvador Nasralla of the leftist Alliance Against the Dictatorship coalition also proclaimed himself to be the winner. The Opposition denounces the Constitutional Court’s decision to allow Hernandez to run for re-election, despite a constitutional one-term limit, a move that has also sparked fears of a crisis in the crime-wracked country. [caption id=“attachment_4229347” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] File image of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez. Wikimedia Commons[/caption] An estimated six million people were eligible to vote, electing not just a president but also members of Congress, mayors and members of the Central American parliament. Still “we have observed a quiet process; what we have seen so far has been positive,” said Marisa Matias, a European parliament observer from Portugal, one of some 1,60,000 monitors. Hernandez’s conservative National Party — which controls the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government — contends that a 2015 Supreme Court ruling allows his re-election. “Thanks to everyone for strengthening democracy,” Hernandez said on Twitter. “We are leading and we are going to win decisively.” The Opposition, though, has denounced his bid, saying the court does not have the power to overrule the 1982 constitution. Hernandez’s main rivals — former TV anchor Nasralla and Luis Zelaya, 50, of the right-leaning Liberal Party — had both said before the vote that they would not recognize a Hernandez victory. “It’s an atypical electoral process with an illegal re-election,” said Zelaya after voting. Nasralla, while visiting voting stations around the capital to rally his supporters, urged them to be vigilant for signs of fraud. “They are out here offering poor people food, roof tiles or cement in exchange for their vote,” he complained. “I tell them that that’s how they are going to stay poor. I am going to create jobs for them.” Hernandez, 49, cast his vote early in his hometown of Gracias, in mountainous western Honduras, accompanied by his daughter and several National Party deputies. “Four more years,” supporters chanted as he arrived. Hernandez told reporters he had been up early, messaging with organizers to be sure the elections would take place smoothly. Honduras, in the heart of the “Northern Triangle” of Central America where gangs and poverty reign, has one of the highest murder rates in the world, though that metric has fallen during Hernandez’s four years in office. What credit he claims from that progress is counterbalanced by tensions from a 2009 coup. That year, then-president Manuel Zelaya was deposed by the armed forces, with backing from the right and from powerful businessmen, for nudging closer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Zelaya — no relation to the Liberal Party candidate — was notably accused of wanting to change the constitution to vie for a second term.