The Nobel committee on Friday snubbed US President Donald Trump and awarded Maria Corina Machado with peace prize for the year 2025.Nobel Peace Prize 2025 was awarded to Maria Corina Machado for her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.“
Machado, a central figure in Venezuela’s pro-democracy movement, is a powerful symbol of civilian courage in Latin America. For decades, she has defied the repressive regime of Nicolás Maduro, enduring threats, arrests, and political persecution. Despite living under constant risk, she has remained in Venezuela, inspiring millions through her insistence on peaceful resistance and free elections.Read Also | Who is Maria Corina Machado? Winner of 2025 Nobel Peace PrizeThis comes after Trump has repeatedly claimed that he deserves the award for resolving conflicts ranging from those between Pakistan and India to those between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
While Trump had claimed credit for pressuring both sides to reach the deal, the timing made it unlikely that the Nobel Committee considered it
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The five-member committee held its final meeting on Monday, when it completed the statement explaining its choice, which is usually decided days in advance.
“The Gaza deal has absolutely no significance for the choice of the 2025 laureate because the Nobel Committee has already made its decision,” historian and Peace Prize expert Asle Sveen told news agency AFP.“Trump will not win the prize this year. I’m 100 percent certain,” he had said.Three sitting US presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Theodore Roosevelt in 1906, Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and Barack Obama in 2009. Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002, a full two decades after leaving office. Former Vice President Al Gore received the prize in 2007.Obama, who was a focus of Trump’s attacks well before the Republican was elected, won the prize early in his tenure as president.“He got the prize for doing nothing,” Trump said of Obama on Thursday. “They gave it to Obama for doing absolutely nothing but destroying our country.”As Trump pushes for peaceful resolutions to conflicts abroad, the country he governs remains deeply divided and politically fraught. Trump has kicked off what he hopes to be the largest deportation program in American history to remove immigrants in the U.S. illegally. He is using the levers of government, including the Justice Department, to go after his perceived political enemies. He has sent the military into U.S. cities over local opposition to stop crime and crack down on immigration enforcement.He withdrew the United States from the landmark Paris climate agreement, dealing a blow to worldwide efforts to combat global warming. He touched off global trade wars with his on-again, off-again tariffs, which he wields as a threat to bend other countries and companies to his will. He asserted presidential war powers by declaring cartels to be unlawful combatants and launching lethal strikes on boats in the Caribbean that he alleged were carrying drugs.The peace prize, first awarded in 1901, was created partly to encourage ongoing peace efforts. Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that the prize should go to someone “who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.”A total of 338 individuals and organisations were nominated for the 2025 Peace Prize, but the list remains secret for 50 years. Last year’s prize went to Nihon Hidankyo, an organisation of survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings that campaigns against nuclear weapons.The Nobel Peace Prize includes a diploma, a gold medal, and a $1.2 million cash award. The economics prize, to be announced on Monday, will conclude the 2025 Nobel season, which has already seen awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, and peace.
