US President Donald Trump was passed over for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize as Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the honor to María Corina Machado, Venezuela’s most influential opposition leader.
Norwegian Nobel committee chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, commended Machado as a “brave and committed champion of peace” who “keeps the flame of democracy burning during a growing darkness”. The committee said “democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent”.
Machado has been a key unifying figure in a political opposition that was once deeply divided, an opposition that found common ground in the demand for free election and representative government.
Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire for a Nobel Peace Prize, an honor previously bestowed on one of his presidential predecessors, Barack Obama, in 2009 for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples”. Even during his first term, Trump was saying how much he deserved one.
Responding to the question about the Trump lobbying effort to win the prize, Nobel committee chair, Jørgen Watne Frydnes, said the committee receives thousands of letters every year and makes its decision in a room “filled with both courage and integrity”.
But – aside from the merits of his case – the president’s hopes were dashed by the fact that the nomination process ended on January 31, when he had only been in office for 11 days.
The 2024 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a grassroots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for its efforts “to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.”
The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised the group “for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again.”
Nihon Hidankyo, also known as Hibakusha, was formed by witnesses to the only two nuclear bombs ever to be used in war. The survivors have dedicated their lives to trying to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
History of the Nobel Peace Prize
The Nobel Peace Prize has not been awarded every year.
It was skipped on 19 occasions, specifically in 1914–1916, 1918, 1923, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1939–1943, 1948, 1955–1956, 1966–1967, and 1972, usually due to war or the absence of a suitable candidate.
According to the statutes of the Nobel Foundation, if none of the candidates’ work is deemed significant enough, the prize may be withheld and the prize money carried forward to the next year. If it still cannot be awarded, the amount is transferred to the foundation’s restricted funds.
One notable instance came in 1948, the year Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated. Gandhi had been nominated several times – in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1947, and again in 1948 – for his nonviolent leadership of India’s freedom movement. In 1948, the Nobel Committee chose not to award the prize, citing “no suitable living candidate”, widely seen as an implicit tribute to him.
The Nobel Peace Prize has only been refused on one occasion. In 1973, Vietnamese politician Le Duc Tho and US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger were awarded the prize for their efforts to end the Vietnam War.
Tho declined the award, citing the ongoing conflict in Vietnam because Kissinger and the United States had violated a ceasefire. Kissinger accepted the prize.
