María Machado receives Nobel Peace Prize Who is the woman who outdoes Trump?
She has been threatened, banned, briefly arrested - and yet she won't give up: Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado receives the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize.
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- María Corina Machado is considered Venezuela's best-known opposition politician and founder of the liberal-conservative movement Vente Venezuela.
- Despite being banned from her profession, house searches and brief arrests, she continues to lead the resistance against President Maduro.
- The 2025 Nobel Peace Prize honors her peaceful commitment to democracy, the rule of law and freedom of expression in Latin America.
María Corina Machado wins the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her decades of work in the Venezuelan opposition. The 58-year-old from Caracas has hardly lived a day without risk in the past twenty years. Now the Nobel Committee is honoring her for her struggle, which began with civic engagement and became a life's work.
Machado, an engineering graduate of the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello and Yale World Fellow, founded the citizens' initiative Súmate in 2002, which campaigned for free elections. Even then, she was targeted by the Chávez government and later by his successor Nicolas Maduro. In an interview with El País, she later said: "The only thing Maduro has left is terror" - the only thing Maduro still has is fear and intimidation.
In 2010, she was elected to the National Assembly with the highest number of votes in Venezuela. However, her opposition work ended abruptly: in 2014, the regime revoked her mandate and she was later banned from running for president. Nevertheless, she remained in the country.
When Maduro took office for his third term in 2025, Machado continued to organize the resistance - despite the risk of being arrested herself. According to Reuters, she was briefly arrested on January 9, 2025 after her vehicle was blocked during a demonstration. The day before, she had declared in a virtual press conference:
«Venezuela will be free - I don't know when, but I will live to see it»
Machado stands for the fight against what Human Rights Watch describes as "institutionalized repression" in its World Report 2025. She calls for peaceful resistance, denounces corruption and demands free media. Their movement Vente Venezuela continues to grow - despite threats, internet blockades and systematic censorship.
Venezuela's regime held elections in May. Machado called for a boycott. "The power is ours - including the power to disobey," she said. In fact, the election, in which many people did not take part in protest, was condemned internationally as a farce. The ruling coalition under Maduro won the alleged 83 percent of the vote.
"Battle between truth and lies"
In June 2025, Machado presented a USD 1.7 trillion economic plan to the Council of the Americas (AS-COA), which aims to re-industrialize Venezuela within 15 years. Her vision: "We don't fight for power, we fight for dignity." In other words: "We don't fight for power, we fight for dignity."
Machado does not see herself as a politician, but as a citizen in the service of the republic. She told Reuters: "It is the coordination between internal and external forces that will bring about change" - a declaration of war on the regime, even after decades.
Machado remains, as she herself said, "neither in exile nor in silence". She knows that she has to reassert herself every day. According to the chairman of the Nobel Committee, she is currently in hiding. Whether she will come to Oslo for the award ceremony is a question of security.
