Over 20 years ago, when Maria Corina Machado first confronted Venezuela’s deep institutional rot, she knew the choice was clear: It would be ballots over bullets. As she challenged the authoritarian regimes of Hugo Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro, demanding free and fair elections and campaigning against their repressive measures, she was tried for treason, stripped of her seat in the National Assembly, repeatedly threatened with physical violence, barred from election and forced to go into hiding. That she has never stopped speaking up and reaching out to her beleaguered fellow citizens is a measure of her great personal courage. For the Nobel Committee, which has honoured her long fight with the Peace Prize for 2025, it is also an exemplar of what it takes to keep the flame of democracy alive.
At a time of deepening authoritarianism around the world, this year’s Peace Prize acknowledges that the work of democracy is never done, that it must be defended as much against tyranny as against cynicism and indifference. Democracy, as the Nobel Committee has said, “depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk and who remind us that freedom must never be taken for granted”. The refusal to be mute in the face of despotism and cruelty often comes at great personal cost — imprisonment, exile, violence and even death — but this is what makes the fight so precious.
Peace, of course, is not just the absence of war. Peace can exist only where there is freedom, where people have the right to choose and where they have a voice and hand in shaping their nation’s future. The honouring of Machado’s tireless efforts to restore democracy in her country is an endorsement of the fact that the work of peace is not just conducted at the high diplomatic table; it happens in the trenches of the everyday struggle for justice and in the labour of all those who resist tyranny at every level.
