Politicians from several Norwegian parties have criticized this Friday the decision of the Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado to deliver to US President Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize medalwith which she was honored last month in Oslo.
“Even though Trump has received the medal, that does not mean that he has won the Peace Prize,” former Foreign Minister and liberal MP Ine Eriksen Søreide told Norwegian public television NRK.
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In statements to the same medium, the leader of the Centrist Party, Trygve Slagsvold Vedum, stressed the same idea and pointed out that the fact that Trump has accepted the medal shows that he is “the classic fool who has to appropriate the distinctions and work of others.”
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“This is above all something absurd and meaningless,” said the leader of the red-green Socialist Left Party, Kirsti Bergstø.
This party and another left-wing force, Rojo, both allies of the minority Labor Government, already criticized Machado’s election at the time.
“Now the Nobel medal is hanging in Trump’s office and, unfortunately, it is a predictable consequence of the Nobel Committee’s decision,” declared Rojo’s foreign policy spokesman, Bjørnar Moxnes.
Moxnes was in favor of a reform of the Nobel Peace Committee, whose five members are appointed by the Norwegian Parliament every six years, according to the correlation of forces in the Chamber.
In case there were any doubts, Trump and Machado posed for the cameras with the Nobel Peace Prize in their hands.
“Members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee should be chosen based on their qualifications,” Moxnes said.
The former mayor of Oslo and former Labor politician Raymond Johanssen, now head of the NGO Norwegian People’s Aid, called what happened “incredibly embarrassing and damaging to one of the most important and recognized awards.”
The Norwegian Nobel Institute had stressed the day before on social networks, before the meeting between Trump and Machado, that the award “cannot be revoked, shared or transferred to others,” and specified that “a medal can change owners, but the title of Nobel Peace Prize cannot.”
Machado defended the gesture the day before as a message of “gratitude” from the Venezuelan people for their actions to achieve “their freedom.”
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The Venezuelan opponent used a frame with gold details to place the Nobel medal that she gave to the president and at the top she wrote: “in gratitude for his extraordinary leadership to promote peace” and added that it is a gift from the Venezuelan people for their actions to direct “their freedom,” according to photos of the delivery at the White House, published by the New York Post.
Other prize winners have given away or sold the Nobel prize in the past, as Norwegian media recalled this Friday.
This happened, for example, in 2022 with the Russian Dimitri Muratov, who donated the proceeds to help Ukrainian refugees.
One of the most memorable cases is that of the Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who in 1943 sent his Nobel medal to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
