Between the decision of the Nobel Prize Committee – the Committee – not to award US President Donald Trump the Nobel Peace Prize and give it to the Venezuelan María Corina Machado while the Swedish Academy awarded the Literature prize to the Hungarian László Krasznahorkai there is an ethical common thread in the defense of democratic values that are threatened in various parts of the world.
That is to say, the members of the Committee who are the ones who after deliberating award the Peace Prize – the rest is awarded by the Swedish Academy – once again took sides in the face of the processes of democratic regression and the sustained advance of “big technology companies and political leaders with authoritarian and national-populist instincts”, as the Italian political scientist Giuliano de Empoli rightly maintains in his new book The hour of the predators and only, I would add, it also positions itself against autocratic rulers who, coming to power through democratic means, already in the exercise of government, weaken or destroy counterweights seeking to remain in power forever.
The Prize, let us remember, is not just another piece in the museum of international recognition, it is an award that gives international moral legitimation without political or ideological distinctions and, for this reason, such contrasting figures as Yasir Arafat, Henry Kissinger, Teresa of Calcutta or our compatriot Alfonso García Robles have received it.
Even better, between 2015 and 2024, four were delivered to institutions and figures committed to democracy from Tunisia to Iran, from Russia to the Philippines, from Colombia to Belarus.
For many, this Nobel was deserved by Donald Trump for his activism to end the war in the Middle East, however, that opinion apparently did not weigh in the Committee’s final decision and they ended up giving it to Machado, to “the demonic witch,” as Nicolás Maduro called her, provoking Machado and the strident rejection of the Bolivarian left.
An example of this discomfort was President Sheinbaum’s pathetic response regarding the recognition of Machado: No comments, she said, a matter of sovereignty, only to a minute later ingratiate herself with the Peruvian legislative process that ousted President Dina Doluarte from power.
Trump, although democratically elected, has been associated with “institutional erosion, contempt for the free press, and the use of power to polarize and violate human rights” as basic as those of migrants who are being deported and living at the drop of a hat.
Machado, on the other hand, represents a prize for civil and democratic resistance against an authoritarian regime, which reaffirms the original meaning of the Nobel Prize as a defense of political freedom and human rights.
Of course, leaders and spokespersons of the Bolivarian left quickly questioned without taking care of the forms, even President Gustavo Petro who came to think that he deserved it for his project of “total peace” lied, when he stated that María Corina Machado had requested in 2018 the military intervention of Israel and Argentina when in her public letter she asked them to assert their diplomatic “strength and influence” in 2018 to pressure Maduro and that he will leave power.
Therefore, the Nobel Peace Prize functions as a global moral counterweight and is awarded without responding to the balance of power but rather to a deliberative idea of politics.
Ergo, the decision is an act of moral accountability as it exercises a kind of ethical control over world leaders.
In the case of Machado, it also implies visibility and protection of the democratic opposition silenced in his own country, strengthening the idea that legitimacy does not end at the polls and, even less so, with a fraud that we all saw in 2024 causing repression and a diaspora of Venezuelans due to the lack of respect for the rule of law, plurality and human rights.
Ultimately, the action of the members of the Committee means that their decisions correct the excesses of national power when it deviates from the rules of the democratic game to impose, in this case, a dictatorship.
And this is also the case with the Nobel Prize for the literary work of László Krasznahorkai considered “dense, apocalyptic, deeply humanist,” a sign of great literature in its “search for meaning in the face of chaos, a metaphor for spiritual resistance in times of political cynicism.”
It is a recognition of “introspection, doubt and complexity”, values that oppose binary thinking, rhetoric and media simplification that characterizes the new populisms and autocracies of the 21st century.
Hungary, let us remember, has as president Víktor Orbán, a right-wing autocrat who since coming to power has dedicated himself to weakening institutional counterweights under the medieval pretext of protecting “national identity” and “Christian sovereignty”, and promotes an anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and anti-European narrative combining a strong nationalism that goes hand in hand with media control and censorship. cultural which means a resurgence of intolerance and persecution of ideas in that eastern European country.
Thus, the Swedish Academy, by presenting this award, reaffirms that democracy is also sustained by the moral imagination and the depth of language and, in that logic, the Prize can be read as an intellectual and moral response to Orbán himself insofar as it means the recognition of a frontal way of thinking in the face of the totalizing discourse of power.
Krasznahorkai’s ethics of restlessness empathizes with the essence of Book of Disquiet by the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa for his total rejection of conformism when it comes to moral density and the resistance of language in the face of ideological manipulation that exposes the fragility of the human soul under oppressive structures.
Thus, while Orbán seeks to impose chauvinism, Krasznahorkai offers metaphysical doubt; While the autocrat seeks the single thought, the writer multiplies the inner voices.
In short, denying Trump the award was an act of defense of truth, institutions and republican ethics; meanwhile, award Machado, a gesture of solidarity with those who defend liberal democracy in contexts of repression; Meanwhile, Krasznahorkai’s award is a vindication of human complexity in the face of political and media noise, where the triad of democracy, freedoms and global moral responsibility does not seem to be liked because “it plays into the hands of supranational imperialism.”