Politics behind Peace Prize

Indeed, if Maria Corina Machado, winner of the 2025 Prize for Peace, was the kind of “brave and committed champion of peace... a woman who keeps the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness,’ as the Norwegian Nobel Committee claims, the entire world should be concerned, as much about the politics of the recipient of the honour as the wisdom of those who have been bestowing it annually, unfailingly, since 190L Absurd enough, the European parliament, in 2024, conferred the Andrei Sakharov Prize for the Freedom of Thought, named after the Soviet nuclear physicist and 1975 Nobel laureate, jointly upon Machado and Edmundo Gonzalez, widely believed to have won the Venezuelan 2024 presidential election.

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Venezuela's opposition leader may have waged a relentless campaign against the brutalities and excesses of the third-term autocratic President Nicolas Maduro’s regime over the past decade and more. First elected to the National Assembly in 2006, Machado was arbitrarily barred from the 2024 presidential race as the candidate of the opposition Unitary Platform. But in a checkered career, the trained engineer has also been twice tainted for treason—once in the 2002 attempted coup detat against then president Hugo Chavez, where Machado was a signatory to the Pedro Carmona declaration that sought to dissolve all government institutions. The other relates to her role in the 200