The Nobel Peace Prize is considered the most prestigious political award on the planet. Who gets it is always a big secret beforehand. There are still a few favorites.
50 years after Willy Brandt received the award, it is announced in Oslo who will receive the Nobel Peace Prize this year. The Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce its decision at 11 a.m. today.
Last year the award went to the United Nations World Food Program, which was honored, among other things, for its fight against hunger in the world. As in the previous year, the Nobel Prizes are endowed with ten million Swedish kronor (around 980,000 euros) per category.
The Nobel Peace Prize is considered the most prestigious political award in the world. 329 candidates – 234 personalities and 95 organizations – have been nominated this time. This is the third largest number of nominees ever. The names of the nominees are traditionally kept secret for 50 years. Ex-Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt, the last German award winner, was honored in 1971 for his Ostpolitik, which had contributed to the détente in the Cold War.
As every year, there is much speculation this time about who might receive the Nobel Prize. As in the previous year, the betting offices see the World Health Organization WHO, which is very present in the corona pandemic, in front. In view of this year’s floods and forest fires as well as the upcoming important world climate conference COP26 in Glasgow, however, peace researchers consider it possible that the fight against the climate crisis will be awarded the prize.
Candidates for the Prize
Possible candidates for this would be the leading climate activist Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement, but also the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), whose secretariat is in Bonn. Most recently, the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded with a clear reference to the topic of climate protection. The winners at the time were the IPCC and the former US Vice President and climate educator Al Gore.
In many places it is suspected that the Nobel Prize could also go to an organization that advocates freedom of the press, such as Reporters Without Borders or the Committee for the Protection of Journalists (CPJ). The Belarusian opposition leader Svetlana Tichanowskaja, the Russian Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny and activists from Hong Kong are also mentioned more frequently as possible winners. However, the respective Nobel committees are always good for a surprise: very few had previously suspected that the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize would go to the World Food Program.
The winners in the categories medicine, physics, chemistry and literature were announced this week. Among them were two Germans, the meteorologist Klaus Hasselmann and the chemist Benjamin List. Next Monday, the Nobel Prize in Economics will conclude.
The new Nobel Peace Prize laureate is the only one to be announced not in Stockholm, but in Oslo. The awards are traditionally presented on December 10th, the anniversary of the death of the prize donor and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896).
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