OSLO, Norway – Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for fighting dictatorship in the country and dedicated the award in part to U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly insisted he deserved it.

Machado, a 58-year-old industrial engineer who lives in hiding, was blocked in 2024 by Venezuela’s courts from running for president and thus challenging President Nicolas Maduro, who has been in power since 2013.

“Oh my God … I have no words,” Machado told the secretary of the award body, Kristian Berg Harpviken, in a phone call which the Nobel Committee posted on social media.

“I thank you so much, but I hope you understand this is a movement, this is an achievement of a whole society. I am just one person. I certainly do not deserve it,” she added.

She later said, in an X post in English: “I dedicate the prize to the suffering people of Venezuela and to President Trump for his decisive support of our cause!”

Trump is a fierce critic of Maduro and the U.S. is one of a number of countries that does not recognise his government’s legitimacy.

The White House had earlier criticised the Norwegian Nobel Committee’s decision to focus on Venezuela just days after Trump announced a breakthrough in talks to halt the fighting in Gaza between Israel and Hamas.

“President Trump will continue making peace deals, ending wars, and saving lives… The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace,” White House spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a post on X.

Maduro, whose 12 years in office have been marked by deep economic and social crisis, was sworn in for a third term in January this year, despite a six-month-long election dispute, international calls for him to stand aside and an increase in the U.S. reward offered for his capture.

“When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognise courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist,” the Nobel Committee said in its citation.

Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state, nominated Machado for the Peace Prize together with a group of U.S. members of Congress in August 2024, when he was still a senator.

It was not immediately clear whether she would be able to attend the award ceremony in Oslo on Dec. 10, the anniversary of the death of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, who founded the awards in his 1895 will.

Should she not attend, she would join the list of Peace Prize laureates prevented from doing so in the award’s 124-year history, including Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov in 1975, Poland’s Lech Walesa in 1983 and Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi in 1991.

Machado is the first Venezuelan to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the sixth from Latin America. Her three adult children are living abroad for safety reasons.

The United Nations human rights office welcomed the award to Machado as a recognition of “the clear aspirations of the people of Venezuela for free and fair elections.”