TEGUCIGALPA -- National Party candidate Porfirio Lobo won the presidency of Honduras, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, or TSE, said.

Lobo garnered 55.9 percent of the vote, while ruling Liberal Party candidate Elvin Santos won 30.09 percent, with 61.89 percent of the ballots counted.

Lobo said he would work for unity and reconciliation in Honduras, which has been embroiled in a political crisis caused by the June 28 ouster of former President Manuel Zelaya.

"We will create a national unity government, a government of national reconciliation," Lobo said in an address to his supporters.

The head of the Central American nation's current government, Roberto Micheletti, said he would hand over power to Lobo "without any conditions."

Zelaya, for his part, described Lobo as a "personal friend," but one with whom he had "very big political differences."

Santos was hurt in his campaign against Lobo because the Liberal Party split over the ouster of Zelaya, who belongs to the party.

Micheletti is also a member of the Liberal Party.

Zelaya supporters argue a free and fair vote was impossible given the repression imposed by Micheletti's "interim" regime, which has killed at least a dozen people, imprisoned hundreds and repeatedly shut down independent media.

While most Organization of American States members have said they would not recognize the Honduran elections, Washington backed the process and personnel from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, both funded by the U.S. Congress, were in Honduras to observe the balloting.

Even Nobel laureate Costa Rica President Oscar Arias, who had brokered the accord between the two sides, also announced that he was supporting the election. "Why do we want to make Honduras into the Burma of Central America? Why do we want a second Hurricane Mitch?" he told CNN en Espanol.

Neighbor Panama has also announced that it will recognize the results as well.

Zelaya, who has been holed up at the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa since slipping back into the country on Sept. 21, denied over the weekend that he was seeking political asylum abroad.

He had accepted a U.S.-brokered deal last month to end a months-long stand-off.

Under the terms of the agreement, a unity government was to be formed and the Honduran Congress was to vote whether or not to reinstate Zelaya.

But Zelaya refused to propose candidates to the national unity government until after a Congressional vote on his reinstatement and pronounced the pact "dead" earlier this month after Micheletti formed a “national unity” government at the deadline agreed to in the timetable set out in the accord. Zelaya never proposed any candidates.

Congress is expected to conduct the vote on Wednesday, and the Supreme Court has already weighed in with a advisory legal opinion against Zelaya's reinstatement. It is not clear why Zelaya decided to agree to let Congress decide on his reinstatement, as the deposed former president enjoys the support of only about a fifth of the legislators, and Congress had before his ouster already opened an investigation into whether he was mentally fit to govern, voted to disapprove his violations of the Constitution and even members of his own political party voted to replace him with Micheletti after he was ousted.

U.S. assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere Affairs Thomas Shannon said that Washington would recognize the election winner regardless of whether Zelaya was reinstated.

In the eyes of Constituional scholars and most Hondurans, Zelaya’s ouster was not a coup. The soldiers who escorted Zelaya from the presidential palace were enforcing a Supreme Court order after Zelaya refused to comply with their earlier order banning his planned referendum on revising the constitution to allow for unlimited presidential terms. The Constitution calls for immediate disempowerment of any official who does so.

Article 239 of the Honduran Constitution says “Any citizen who has already served as head of the Executive Branch cannot be President or Vice-President again. Whoever violates this law or proposes its reform, as well as those who support such violation directly or indirectly, must immediately cease in their functions and will be unable to hold any public office for a period of 10 years.”

In August, the U.S. Congress Law Library issued a report that calls the disempowerment of Zelaya, with the exception of the removal of Zelaya from the country, constitutional under Honduran law.

According to report author Norma Gutiérrez, the Honduran Congress has the power to "disapprove of the conduct of the president".

The Congress "implicitly exercised its power of constitutional interpretation in the case of Zelaya when it decided that its power to 'disapprove' the president's actions encompassed the power to remove him", the report says.

The Honduran establishment says that Zelaya, a former rancher who moved to the left once in office, had been taken under the wing of Venezuelan socialist President Hugo Chavez, who is reviled by conservatives across Latin America.


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