Caribbean & Central America - February 2012 (ISSN 1741-4458)

Though handily elected in November 2009, President Porfirio Lobo was always going to be a divisive transitional figure after the coup d’etat in June 2009. While in the aftermath of the coup, the traditional two-party political scene in Honduras seemed to splinter, with the emergence of new left-wing and populist outfits, Lobo’s ruling Partido Nacional  (PN) as yet faces no serious competition ahead of the next general election in November 2013, according to the latest national poll.

Just under half (49%) of Hondurans disapprove of how Lobo is running the country, according to a poll by CID-Gallup, published on 7 February. The poll interviewed 262,000 adults between 20-25 January in 16 departments. The complainants cited insecurity and unemployment as their main concerns. Honduras suffers the ignominy of one of the highest murder rates in the world (82 per 100,000 in 2011). At the same time, 46% of respondents approved of Lobo. However, CID-Gallup noted that this support was relatively concentrated among his “co-religious”. The same respondents also said that their family economic situation had improved over the previous year.

Although Lobo is not particularly liked, the ruling PN will take heart from the fact that it remains the most popular party in the country, with 37% of respondent preferences, compared to just 25% for the other main traditional Partido Liberal (PL). The PN and the PL, both fairly conservative and US-facing, have alternated in power for decades. However the PL’s fortunes have evaporated since the coup against the former president Manuel Zelaya (2006-2009), of the PL, in June 2009. The PL was badly riven by the coup and its aftermath and has yet to recover. Lobo and the PN were elected by a landslide six months after the coup in November 2009, largely for want of any other alternative.

Zelaya has since gone on to help found a new radical left-wing party, Libertad y Refundación (Libre), taking some PL members with him, and in early February he officially resigned from the PL. The party is trying to reinvent itself ahead of the next scheduled general election in November 2013, under the stewardship of its current president Elvin Santos. To date four candidates have announced a bid for the PL’s presidential nomination: Mauricio Villeda, Wenceslao Lara, Yani Rosenthal and Luis Alfonso Santos.

Santos, formally Zelaya’s vice president and fierce party rival, will also take comfort in the fact that just 6% of respondents expressed support for Libre in the latest poll. That bodes badly for Zelaya, who aims to field his wife Xiomara Castro as Libre’s presidential candidate in 2013. There is a chance that the support for Zelaya/Libre is understated, but it’s also well worth remembering that Zelaya was an unpopular president at the time of his removal and many still blame him for fomenting the still-bitter political divisions in the country.

• Nasralla, a dark horse?

Curiously, a TV personality and beauty contest host-turned politician, Salvador Nasralla, was identified as the most popular figure in the country. Nasralla founded his own outfit, Partido Anticorrupción, last year and it was registered by the electoral court in October 2011. Nasralla touts himself as “neither of the Left nor the Right” and runs a populist, anti-institutional message. He has none of the party machinery of the PN (which runs 17 of the country’s 18 departments and a majority of municipalities), but that is not a reason to discount him yet.

Close on his heels is the PN mayor of Tegucigalpa, Ricardo Alvarez, who is vying with the powerful PN head of congress and Lobo’s main sidekick, Juan Orlando Hernández, to become the PN’s presidential candidate in 2013. Xiomara Castro is also a popular figure in her own right; her husband may be her greatest electoral handicap.  

• Narco mayors

Mauricio Villeda, a presidential aspirant for a conservative wing of the opposition Partido Liberal, has caused a major row after declaring that “we already have narco-mayors and narco-deputies in Honduras”. The ruling Partido Nacional, which dominates at the municipal level, has taken great offence at the comments, with the popular mayor of Tegucigalpa, Ricardo Alvarez, also a presidential aspirant for 2013, demanding that Villeda produce evidence. However in the wake of Villeda’s comments, the national electoral court and the national council against drug trafficking on 7 February announced plans for new measures to “armour” (blindar) the 2013 election campaign from the influence of organised crime and narco cash.