Porfirio Lobo, pictured below, has won the support of Hondurans. Now he must convince the outside world of his legitimacy

Reuters

THE day after Manuel Zelaya was ousted as Honduras’s president in late June, Barack Obama warned that “it would be a terrible precedent if we start moving backwards into the era in which we are seeing military coups as a means of political transition.” This week that appears to be exactly what has happened.

On November 29th the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti achieved its main aim of holding a presidential election to choose Mr Zelaya’s successor. All five political parties took part, including the far-left Democratic Unification party, which reneged on a promise to withdraw if Mr Zelaya was not reinstated. Despite warnings of violent protests and a call to boycott the election by Mr Zelaya’s “resistance” movement, voting took place fairly calmly, disturbed only by one clash between police and demonstrators in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second city.

Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, the amiable leader of the centre-right National Party, won a clear mandate with 55% of the vote—primarily because the rival Liberal Party was divided between backers of Mr Micheletti and Mr Zelaya. Turnout seems to have been around the 55% mark reached in the 2005 election, when Mr Zelaya narrowly beat Mr Lobo.

That was swiftly followed by another rejection of Mr Zelaya, who has been trapped in Brazil’s embassy for over two months under threat of arrest on 18 criminal charges. On December 2nd the country’s Congress voted by 111 to 14 to reaffirm its decree of June 28th that proclaimed Mr Micheletti president hours after some 200 soldiers barged into Mr Zelaya’s home and flew him to Costa Rica at gunpoint. The vote, which prevents Mr Zelaya from serving out his last two months in office, was part of an American-sponsored deal in which both leaders agreed to let the legislature decide the deposed president’s fate.

This outcome may delay a second decision—the recognition by the outside world of Mr Lobo, and the benefits that would flow from that. All the countries of the Americas and the European Union severed relations with Honduras after the coup, and many cut aid programmes. The United States, along with Colombia, Costa Rica, Panama and Peru, has said it will restore ties once Mr Lobo is inaugurated on January 27th. Canada and Mexico are expected to follow suit. But for now the rest of the region says it will not. A meeting of Latin American and Iberian leaders in Portugal this week ended with no agreement on what to do about Honduras.

The American decision to recognise the election followed a change of policy. Barack Obama’s administration lined up with the rest of the region in condemning the coup. It left mediation to Óscar Arias, the president of Costa Rica, whose mission had the backing of the Organisation of American States. Mr Arias proposed a deal that would reinstate Mr Zelaya on condition that he abandon his efforts to rewrite the constitution (which his opponents saw as a scheme to stay in office). But Mr Micheletti rejected the proposal. He was emboldened by support from Republicans in Washington. They blocked the appointment of two of Mr Obama’s nominees to senior diplomatic posts in protest at what they saw as the administration’s support for Mr Zelaya, an ally of Venezuela’s leftist president, Hugo Chávez.

In response, Mr Obama dispatched negotiators to Tegucigalpa, Honduras’s capital, to browbeat the feuding leaders into a deal. This quickly fell apart, because it failed to guarantee Mr Zelaya’s reinstatement, or require Honduras’s Congress to vote on this before the election. But it provided cover for the United States to change course and declare that it would recognise the result of the election.

Like his lobbying, Mr Micheletti’s selective repression also proved effective. The de facto government intermittently suspended hostile media. It deployed the army to break up large—and sometimes violent—opposition rallies, causing many injuries. Leftist human-rights groups—sadly, such organisations are politicised in Honduras—claim that nearly 30 members of the “resistance” have been killed since the coup. Most of these cases are unsolved murders, perhaps not politically motivated. (Honduras has one of the world’s highest murder rates.) But the human-rights groups have documented two shootings by the army during protests, two cases in which victims were found dead after being arrested, and three killings by security forces of people defying a snap curfew declared by Mr Micheletti after Mr Zelaya sneaked back into Honduras on September 21st. The de facto government recognises four deaths.

The government vowed to charge anyone calling for a boycott of the vote with electoral crimes carrying up to six years in prison. This “climate of fear and threat of violence” led the “resistance” movement to desist from protests on election day, says Rafael Alegría, one of its leaders. Instead it hoped for a weak turnout. But it appears to have misread the country’s mood. Although more Hondurans recognise Mr Zelaya as president than Mr Micheletti, according to a CID/Gallup poll in October, three-quarters of respondents believed that the elections would help to solve the crisis. As a result, many people opposed to the coup still went to the polls.

Even so, Mr Lobo will have his work cut out for him. The first issue is what to do with Mr Zelaya. Mr Lobo must also secure a resumption of foreign aid if the economy is to emerge from recession and avoid drastic cuts in public spending. Although no one expects Honduras to remain a pariah state indefinitely, it is unclear what conditions will be demanded in return for normalising relations.

Lastly he will to try to heal the deep rift in Honduran society generated by the coup, which has split countless families and friendships. The appointment of a truth commission, as part of the deal between Mr Micheletti and Mr Zelaya, might help. Mr Lobo will need to walk a tightrope between making concessions to the “resistance”—which says it will return to agitating for a new constitution—and tending to his socially conservative base. If he fails, his mandate may not last long.