TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — Rony Gómez will stay home when Hondurans go to the polls on Sunday to elect a new president, five months after the military and Congress ousted the last one. “I won’t vote,” he said. “It would be endorsing the coup.”
A Honduran soldier in the capital, Tegucigalpa, guarded ballot boxes for Sunday's elections intended to pick a new president.
The ousted leader is in Brazil's embassy in Tegucigalpa.
The question is how many Hondurans feel like Mr. Gómez, a 40-year-old street vendor and former soldier. Manuel Zelaya, the deposed president, condemns the elections as illegal, and predicts a low turnout that will show that he still enjoys popular support.
But the de facto government that has run the country since the coup last summer argues that the elections — scheduled long before the country’s turmoil began — are the only way to end the political crisis and move on. A large turnout would prove that most Hondurans agree.
Many people here, weary of what they refer to as “the situation,” and worried as the economy spirals downward, say they do plan to vote. “That’s how the transition starts,” said Moisés Bados Castellano, 67, a retired accountant and farmer. “We need democracy in this country.”
In the final days before the vote, the streets here were calm. Campaigning stopped at the end of last week and there was barely an election poster visible by this weekend. The flags and bunting that usually wrap the city’s buildings and cars in the colors of the two leading parties before elections were also absent.
The two leading candidates began running months before Mr. Zelaya was ejected and exiled, but their platforms promising to deal with the global recession, the country’s stubborn poverty, mounting crime and dysfunctional schools instantly were overshadowed by the coup.
Porfirio Lobo, who lost the last election four years ago to Mr. Zelaya, had a double-digit lead in the last polls. Mr. Lobo, 61, a wealthy conservative with a long political career, has danced rhetorical circles around the question of Mr. Zelaya’s future.
“I think it’s fundamental to have a dialogue with all the actors,” Mr. Lobo told foreign reporters Friday. “I know that at some point I will have to talk to Zelaya.”
But he refused to say what might happen to the multiple legal charges, including treason, that Mr. Zelaya faces.
His opponent, Elvín Santos, who had been Mr. Zelaya’s vice president before resigning to run for president, has been a more outspoken supporter of the coup.
As the elections approached, the apparent quiet masked an underlying tension. Over the past week, homemade bombs have exploded here and in San Pedro Sula without any injuries.
“Everything seems fine but there is a dangerous calm,” said Nubia Palma, 58, a lawyer who says she will vote. “There is speculation about a whole pile of things. They could boycott the elections.”
At this point, a significant boycott seems to be the last recourse available to Mr. Zelaya. He has spent the past two months camped out at the Brazilian Embassy after he sneaked back into the country. The de facto government says it will arrest him when he sets foot outside the building.
He spends his days on the telephone with advisers and the media.
“The elections won’t punish the coup,” he said in an interview. “They will elect a fraudulent president.”
He said that he planned to ask for the results to be annulled on the basis of what he expected to be a low turnout.
Along with his wife and two political advisers, there are 18 more people in the embassy, including several reporters and supporters in charge of secretarial work, cleaning and security.
In their spare time, they organize chess tournaments, said Carlos Eduardo Reina, one of the political advisers. Food is allowed in twice a day past the soldiers who are blocking access to the streets around the embassy to keep away supporters.
But the large street protests organized to protest Mr. Zelaya’s ouster have long since dwindled, as security forces have cracked down harshly, beating and arresting demonstrators. The government has closed pro-Zelaya broadcasters.
And human rights groups report constant harassment and threats against Mr. Zelaya’s supporters. United States officials agree that the human rights situation has deteriorated significantly since the coup.
In theory, the world stands with Mr. Zelaya and his condemnation of the elections.
Not a single country has recognized the government of Roberto Micheletti, who was named president by the Congress hours after Mr. Zelaya was flown out of the country. The United States, the European Union and the multilateral banks have all suspended aid to Honduras, one of the poorest countries in Latin America.
The United States, which brokered a deal last month that was to end the crisis and legitimize the elections, has said that it approved of the vote’s going forward. But with the exception of Panama and Costa Rica — whose president had tried to mediate an accord — no other countries in the region have publicly joined the United States in that stance.
Under the deal that the United States worked on and that both Mr. Zelaya and Mr. Micheletti signed, the Honduran Congress was to vote on Mr. Zelaya’s restoration. The two sides were also supposed to form a unity government until Mr. Zelaya’s term expired, as scheduled, at the end of January.
The deal quickly fell apart after Congress delayed its vote — now scheduled for Wednesday — and a unity government was never formed.
United States officials continue to press for some version of the deal. They hope that the election could unlock the country’s political paralysis.
“The newly elected government will have a vested interest that the Micheletti government did not have to engage with the international community,” said Hugo Llorens, the United States ambassador here.
But Mr. Zelaya seems little inclined to continue negotiations.
“The accord was a plan to make the elections legitimate,” he said. “As long as the rule of law isn’t restored, there is nothing.”
A version of this article appeared in print on November 29, 2009, on page A16 of the New York edition.
