(Jan 16): Norway reacted with disbelief to the news that Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado gave her medal to US President Donald Trump, who has long coveted the award.
“That’s completely unheard of,” Janne Haaland Matlary, a professor with the University of Oslo and a former politician, told public broadcaster NRK. “It’s a total lack of respect for the award, on her part,” she said, calling the act “meaningless” and “pathetic”.
Trump, who claims to deserve the peace prize for having resolved numerous wars during his second term, accepted the medal from the Venezuelan opposition leader at a White House meeting on Thursday. He had earlier expressed his dissatisfaction with the decision by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
The award cannot be shared or transferred, the committee said in a statement last week. It didn’t respond to phone calls and text messages seeking comment on Friday.
The controversy is yet another stain on the reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize and underscores how politicised the award has become. The decision to award Machado was seen by some as an attempt to avoid angering Trump after his unprecedentedly aggressive push to secure the prize.
It also stands in stark contrast with events that unfolded in 2022, when Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov auctioned off his 2021 peace prize medal to raise funds for Ukrainians who’ve been made into refugees by President Vladimir Putin’s war. The charitable move didn’t trigger any meaningful objections in Norway.
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For Machado, receiving the Nobel has been a mixed blessing. For months, she has tried to curry favour with Trump, refraining from publicly condemning the deportation of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants, many without criminal records, to an El Salvador prison, or making any comments on strikes on alleged drug boats off the coast of Venezuela that have killed more than 100 people.
She has been shut out of the leadership transition since US forces ousted Nicolás Maduro on Jan 3 but kept his regime in place, and Trump has publicly said she does not have the the support or respect to govern Venezuela.
Still, Machado gifted Trump the Nobel medal, with an inscription thanking him for his “Extraordinary Leadership in Promoting Peace Through Strength, Advancing Diplomacy and Defending Liberty and Prosperity.”
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“I decided to present the medal on behalf of the people of Venezuela,” Machado told Fox News. “I appreciate what he has done not only for the freedom of the Venezuelan people but for the whole hemisphere.”
Machado described Trump as the liberator of her country, according to Fox.
Nobel decisions have often angered or mystified. Barack Obama’s award in 2009 came just months into his first US presidential term, and preceded a surge in US troop numbers in Afghanistan. Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 laureate, who led opposition to the military junta ruling the country, was later criticised internationally for doing too little to prevent the military’s massacre of the Rohingya minority.
More recently, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed won the 2019 award and 12 months later was embroiled in a civil war in the Tigray region of the country that left hundreds of thousands dead, according to the Tigray War Project at the University of Ghent.
In Norway, politicians didn’t mince words when giving their assessment of gifting the medal.
“The fact that Trump is accepting the medal says something about him as a person: a classic braggart who wants to adorn himself with other people’s awards and work,” Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, former finance minister and the current leader of the Center Party, told NRK.
Kirsti Bergsto, the leader of the Socialist Left said the move was “most of all absurd and meaningless”, in a comment to NRK.
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The peace prize is arguably the world’s most prestigious award for diplomatic efforts. It’s one of five Nobel Prizes established under the will of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite who died in 1896.
Regardless of the independence of the Norwegian Nobel Committee and lack of meddling from the government on deciding on the prize, there is a political element: its five members are picked by the parliament. Lawmakers have changed the criteria for qualified candidates several times in the past as they seek to distance the prize from politics.
Norway has also had another run-in with the US this year. A decision to sell Caterpillar Inc shares from the Nordic country’s US$2.1 trillion sovereign wealth fund incensed Trump’s backers and led to the government suspending the ethics council that recommends exclusions to the fund.
The two nations remain engaged in trade talks as Norway hopes to reduce a 15% levy imposed by the US administration as part of its global tariff programme.
“This is unbelievably embarrassing and damaging to one of the world’s most recognised and important prizes,” Raymond Johansen, a former Oslo mayor with the ruling Labor Party said in a Facebook post. “The awarding of the prize is now so politicised and potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimise an anti-peace prize development.”
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