Norway stunned after Machado gifts Nobel Peace Prize medal to Trump

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 has 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 debacle is yet another stain on the reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize and underscores how politicized 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.

 

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 American troops in Afghanistan. Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 laureate, who led opposition to the military junta ruling the country, was later criticized 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, acting 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 comment to NRK.

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 $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 program.

 

Meanwhile in Venezuela, Machado has been shut out of the leadership transition since US forces ousted Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3 but kept his regime in place. Machado gave Trump the medal as “a recognition of his unique commitment with our freedom,” she said on Thursday.

 

“This is unbelievably embarrassing and damaging to one of the world’s most recognized 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 politicized and potentially dangerous that it could easily legitimize an anti-peace prize development.”