On 10 October 2025 the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado for her struggle for a peaceful transition to democracy in Venezuela.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo on 10 October 2025 that the Nobel Peace Prize would go to María Corina Machado, a leader of the Venezuelan opposition, “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy”.
Who she is
An engineer by training, Machado was a member of parliament and is one of the best-known opponents of Nicolás Maduro. She won the 2023 opposition primaries by a wide margin, but the authorities barred her from standing in the July 2024 presidential election, and she backed Edmundo González’s candidacy. The opposition published the polling-station tallies that, it said, proved González had won, while the electoral council, controlled by chavismo, declared Maduro the winner without publishing a breakdown of the results.
Since then Machado had been living in hiding inside Venezuela. González went into exile in Spain in September 2024.
Why it matters
The Committee said she had kept the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness, and the prize gave international prominence to the Venezuelan crisis, which has driven close to eight million people to leave the country over the past decade. Maduro’s government criticised it harshly.
Why it matters here
More than half a million people born in Venezuela live in Spain, the largest community in Europe, and it is one of the main destinations for their savings and investment, above all in property in Madrid and other cities. Venezuela’s political course affects those flows, Spanish companies with interests in the country, such as energy firms, and diplomatic relations between the two.
Democracy is also defended by people with names.
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