Honduras president seeks 2nd term despite constitutional ban
Honduras — Less than a decade ago, even talk of re-election was enough to get a Honduran president overthrown.
Now Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez appears likely to win a second term Sunday as well as bolster the strength of his conservative National Party across the board.
“Hernandez is not just trying to win presidential re-election, he’s trying to expand his power from top to bottom, including in the legislature and at the mayoral level,” said James Bosworth, the founder of Hxagon, a consulting firm that does predictive analysis in emerging markets.
Fears of just that sort of consolidation — but by leftwing rivals — led Hernandez’s own party to back a military coup in 2009 against a president it accused of plotting to violate Honduras’s seemingly ironTEGUCIGALPA, clad constitutional ban on re-election.
The country’s highest court backed the 2009 ouster of Manuel Zelaya. But the current court, packed with Hernandez’s supporters, ruled in 2015 that the constitution could not prevent him from running again — outraging opposition leaders.
“This ruling was a betrayal of the country,” said union leader Carlos H. Reyes. “It is humiliating to live in a country where a dictatorship that answers to the oligarchy install itself.”
Some opposition leaders formed the leftist Opposition Alliance Against Dictatorship to oppose the reelection bid. The Alliance is running Salvador Nasralla, while the traditional Liberal Party is running Luis Zelaya, a middle-of-the-road candidate.
There are another six candidates from tiny opposition parties, but the president remains the clear front-runner.
His popularity is trying is to based largely on a drop in violence in a country whose homicide rate was once among the world’s worst.
The country’s National Autonomous University says the homicide rate has dropped to 59 per 100,000 from a dizzying high of 91.6 in 2011.
Still, Hondurans are among the hemisphere’s poorest people, and even if killings have tapered off somewhat, street gang violence has frightened many people into trying to flee to the United States.