Anti-Chavez activist María Corina Machado, Nobel Peace Prize winner 2025

Barcelona"A woman who keeps the flame of democracy alive amidst the growing darkness." This is how the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, described Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado when he announced that she had been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize. This year's award—which was the subject of the defense's insistence against calling Donald Trump's candidate to offer herself as a candidate—is a call to democracy "at a time when it is under threat worldwide," as Frydnes put it. However, a call that is made while awarding an award to an ally of Donald Trump and the global far right: Machado participated via telematics at the Patriots for Europe summit convened in Madrid by the president of Vox, Santiago AbascalThe head of the Norwegian Committee praised Machado's fight against the regime of Nicolás Maduro, "accused of corruption, authoritarianism, and electoral fraud."

"Thank you very much, but I hope you understand that this is a movement, it's the milestone of an entire society, and I certainly don't deserve it." That was Machado's own reaction when the secretary of the Norwegian Committee called her this morning—in the middle of the night in Venezuela—to announce the award shortly before it was made public. Images of the call have been made public afterwards. "With humility, I am very grateful on behalf of the Venezuelan people. This is the greatest recognition for the Venezuelan people, who deserve it."

Machado's whereabouts are unknown. She says she is hiding in her own country, where she leads the opposition to Chavismo after last year's presidential candidate, Edmundo González, fled Venezuela. González, in fact, ran for office because Machado had been disqualified from running after being elected by an overwhelming majority in the Venezuelan opposition's primary elections. Last year's presidential elections were contested by several independent entities. According to the electoral records leaked to the press, González had won the election, but Maduro became president in January and the opposition candidate fled into exile. María Corina Machado remained in the country, where she was briefly detained by the Maduro regime., and where his whereabouts are still unknown today.

From wherever he is, Machado has continued to express his opinion, as he did at the summit convened by Vox in Madrid, with a video message in which he called for a fight "against tyranny" and denounced "the growing identity crisis that the West is suffering," due to the crisis, he said, of his own. Roman and Judeo-Christian religion." Venezuelan politics have also supported the positioning of Donald Trump's government and its threats to Maduro. Trump has raised the reward for Maduro's arrest to 50 million dollars and has initiated a campaign of airstrikes against ships allegedly belonging to Venezuelan drug traffickers in the Caribbean, which she associates with the Venezuelan government. The opposition leader awarded this Friday does not directly support a US military intervention in Venezuela, a threat that has also been planned against the country at some point, but she has been in contact with the Trump administration through Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and supports the strategy of international pressure and sanctions to overthrow the Chavista regime.

Marco Rubio nominated Machado for the Nobel Prize.

In fact, Marco Rubio himself nominated Machado for the Nobel Peace Prize. Before entering the Trump administration, when he was still a senator from Florida, he signed a letter signed by several US congressmen, both Republican and Democratic, and sent to the Norwegian Committee to defend Machado's candidacy for the prize.

María Corina Machado, 58 years old and trained as an engineer, is a politician with a liberal ideology, but she was chosen to represent the entire opposition in a consensus candidacy for the 2024 presidential elections, although the Maduro regime ultimately disqualified her. "Before being a politician, she was a civil leader. She founded an organization for electoral transparency. Her entire life has been dedicated to dialogue and the democratic participation of civil society," notes the president of the Catalan International Institute for Peace (ICIP), Xavier Masllorens, who believes that María Corina Machado represents "our values." "It is also necessary to value very positively that it is a Nobel Prize in support of democracies and against authoritarianism," says Masllorens.

"She is a fighter for democracy, indeed, but of all the ones in the world I think they have chosen her as a way to protect it, to prevent the Maduro government from being able to act against it at a time when it is radicalizing its repression," says Cidob analyst Anna Ayuso,

However, the president of ICIP also admits that the choice of Machado may be "controversial," since "the opposition that most calls for Venezuela is the right-wing one, a very conservative opposition, very capitalist and very pro-United States" and, therefore, an award to the person who represents this very polar. Another "problem" that Masllorens sees in Machado's choice is that "the democratic transition in Venezuela hasn't really happened, and it's unknown how it will ultimately happen and what role Machado will play," so it could become another premature or controversial Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Machado's choice has already been celebrated by Vox and other members of the global political right. But criticism has not been long in coming. From the Global Sumud Flotilla, activists against the genocide in Gaza have denounced Machado's choice for the Nobel Prize as "a betrayal of Gaza" and as "a political decision deeply rooted in oil." They recalled Machado's stance against the Chavista regime's expropriations and in favor of "privatizing and dismantling" the public company Petróleos de Venezuela to open it up to giants like the US companies Exxon and Chevron, expelled from the country by Chavismo. "US congressmen with strong ties to these corporations have promoted the nomination," they recall.

An award for the fight for democracy around the world

"The message of this prize is that democracy is a condition for peace," the head of the Norwegian Committee emphasized at the press conference presenting the award. "Men and women around the world have faced repression, and María Machado has been a unifying leader of the opposition in Venezuela. What she did in 2024 was very brave and gives hope to the country," added Frydnes, who highlighted Machado's fight "to achieve a just transition." He emphasized that the threat to democracy is not exclusive to Venezuela, but extends throughout the world.In 2024, more elections were held than ever before, but fewer and fewer are truly free.", he said, and that's why they chose Machado.

Frydnes had to answer questions from the press about the candidacy of Donald Trump, who had been nominated for this year's prize. "In the long history of this prize, this committee has seen many campaigns, we have received hundreds of photographs, we have received hundreds of photographs of award-winners, a room that is full of courage and integrity and we only make decisions in accordance with those values and with the legacy of Alfred Nobel," he responded.