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Defenders of press freedom, Belarusian opponents or champions of the climate cause such as the young Swede Greta Thunberg, are among the favorites for the Nobel Peace Prize that is awarded on Friday, October 8 in Oslo.
Oslo (AFP)
As always, each year in the Nobel season, predictions abound as to who could get it.
The exercise is difficult because this year there are 329 candidates, but their identity will remain secret for 50 years. And it is even more difficult since recent advances in peace are scarce.
Among the favorites are defenders of press freedom such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), the network of fact-checkers IFCN, fake news seekers (to which the AFP belongs) or anti-corruption fighters such as Transparency International.
The media “help to hold governments (…) to account with their reporting” and to counteract “the growing challenge posed by fake news and disinformation,” said the director of the Oslo Peace Research Institute ( Prio), Henrik Urdal.
Another possibility is the non-violent opposition in Belarus, where authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko is going into his sixth term after elections widely viewed as fraudulent in August 2020.
Housewife turned candidate despite herself after her husband’s incarceration, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya He claims that he won the elections and is leading the protest from his Lithuanian exile.
The 39-year-old is among the nobelisable, alone or with other opposition figures, Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo.
“It would be a way of underlining the importance of women, democracy and non-violence at the same time,” says Swedish professor Peter Wallensteen, specialist in international affairs.
“An award to Svetlana (Tikhanovskaya) would be an indirect way of criticizing Putin,” since Russia is the main supporter of the Belarusian regime, notes Nobel historian Asle Sveen.
Does Covid-19 damage the party?
Sveen is inclined towards a reward, undoubtedly more media, for the Swedish muse of the fight against climate change, Greta thunberg. On Tuesday, an unprecedented physics award honored climate science experts.
“It is the most important problem of the moment,” underlines Sveen, two months after an alarming report by UN experts (Giec) and weeks before the crucial COP26 conference.
Also mentioned are the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (CCNUCC) and its executive secretary, the Mexican Patricia Espinosa.
A time presented as solid in this period of pandemic, the candidacy of the World Health Organization (WHO) it continues to appear in the bookmakers, but has been plagued by controversies over its role in the failures of the COVAX program to distribute vaccines to poor countries.
Covid-19 did not have much influence on the nature of the proposals submitted to the Nobel committee, according to its secretary, Olav Njølstad. “It would seem, but only the fingers of the hand are counted,” he told AFP.
Other names include the Campaign Against Killer Robots which is supported by the Norwegian Peace Council, the Russian opposition Alexei Navalny or the german chancellor Angela Merkel, which ends his term.
Last year the Nobel Peace Prize went to the World Food Program (WFP), the world’s largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger.
Covid-19, which has already forced the Nobel Prize to be awarded remotely, could still damage the party on December 10, the traditional date for the award ceremony.
For the second year in a row, the Nobel laureates in science and literature will not be present in Stockholm.
For its part, the Nobel Institute in Oslo must decide whether to do a zoom or face-to-face ceremony with this year’s winner.
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