2025 Nobel Peace Prize

Venezuela’s Opposition Leader María Corina Machado Wins 2025 Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO — In a striking decision, the Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado, lauding her sustained efforts to restore democratic governance in Venezuela.

The committee credited her “tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” Machado’s activism stands out in a country where democratic institutions have been eroded and dissent harshly repressed.

Machado, born in Caracas in 1967, is an engineer by training. Early on, she co-founded the civic group Súmate, dedicated to election monitoring and promoting citizen participation in free elections. She later entered formal politics, founding the opposition party Vente Venezuela and helping to unify disparate opposition factions via the Soy Venezuela alliance.

Ahead of Venezuela’s contested 2024 election, she was disqualified from running by the Maduro-controlled authorities. Undeterred, she backed an alternate candidate, helped mobilize volunteer election observers nationwide and amassed independent tallies to contest the government’s announced results.

Despite facing threats, political bans, forced periods in hiding and a hostile state apparatus, Machado remained in Venezuela rather than flee overseas. In awarding the prize, the Nobel Committee called her “one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America.”

Venezuela has slid from a relatively stable democracy to a deeply authoritarian state.The Maduro regime has gerrymandered courts and electoral bodies, disqualified opposition candidates, harassed civil society, and suppressed critical voices.

The 2024 election was marked by credible allegations of vote manipulation, suppression and the refusal to accept counter-tallies.

Meanwhile, Venezuela endures a severe humanitarian and economic collapse: hyperinflation, breakdown of public services, food and medicine shortages and mass emigration (nearly 8 million Venezuelans have left).

Machado’s Nobel Prize thus takes place against this backdrop: a nation with stripped civil space, desperate citizens and an opposition under siege.

While the Peace Prize drew political and international attention, the 2025 Nobel awards also honored major scientific and cultural breakthroughs:

• Medicine / Physiology: Mary E. Brunkow, Fred Ramsdell, and Shimon Sakaguchi were recognized for uncovering mechanisms of peripheral immune tolerance — how the immune system restrains itself to avoid attacking the body.
• Physics: John M. Martinis, John Clarke, and Michel H. Devoret won for demonstrating macroscopic quantum tunnelling and energy quantisation in electrical circuits — bridging quantum phenomena with mesoscopic systems.
• Chemistry: Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson, and Omar M. Yaghi earned the prize for their work on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) — porous materials with applications in gas capture, catalysis, storage, and environmental remediation.
• Literature: Hungarian author László Krasznahorkai was awarded for a body of work that “in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art.”