Published On 10 Oct 2025
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María Corina Machado, a key opposition leader in Venezuela, has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for 2025.
“She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize 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,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee, awarding the prize on Friday at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo said.
Machado ran as the democratic opposition candidate in Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election but was disqualified by the government and went on to support the opposition’s alternative candidate, Edmundo Gonzalez Urrutia.
Incumbent Nicolas Maduro won re-election that year with 51 percent of the vote – his third win since he first took over as president in 2013 after the death of his mentor, former President Hugo Chavez.
But the opposition said the results were rigged, claiming Maduro had only won 30 percent of the vote and that Gonzalez was the real victor.
Protests erupted, demanding the release of election results by individual polling stations and Maduro’s government responded with a brutal crackdown on opposition protesters and leaders.
Jørgen Watne Frydnes, chair of the Norwegian Nobel committee, praised Machado’s decision to remain in her country, having been “forced to live in hiding” after “serious threats against her life”. Her choice, he said, had “inspired millions”.
“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” he said.
The 2024 award was given to Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations, “for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons”.
The recognition honoured the organisation’s decades-long campaign to abolish nuclear weapons and preserve the testimonies of the survivors of the US atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
More to come…
