Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado, the winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, made her first public appearance after 11 months in hiding due to "serious threats against her life" Thursday (December 11), emerging from a hotel balcony in Oslo, Norway, after making a daring escape from her home country.

“I want you all back in Venezuela,” Machado said to a crowd gathered outside the hotel, which chanted, “Freedom! Freedom!” as well as “President! President!” and sang Venezuela's national anthem after seeing her, according to the Associated Press.

Machado appeared hours after her daughter accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on her behalf, which recognized her attempted run against President Nicolás Maduro as keeping "the flame of democracy burning amid a growing darkness" in Venezuela.

"She is receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy," the news release states. "As the leader of the democracy movement in Venezuela, Maria Corina Machado is one of the most extraordinary examples of civilian courage in Latin America in recent times."

Machado is the leader of the Vente Venezuela opposition party, having served as a member of the National Assembly of Venezuela from 2011 to 2014. The Caracas native played a key role in organizing protests against Maduro, at which point she was blocked from running for president and expelled from office.

Machado won the opposition party in 2023 to become the unity candidate for the 2024 Venezuelan presidential election, but was disqualified from holding public office by the Comptroller General of Venezuela in June 2023, a ruling upheld by the Supreme Court of Justice in January 2024, leading to her being replaced by Corina Yoris and later Edmundo González Urrutia in the election. The Venezuelan opposition leader announced her decision to go into hiding in 2024 amid "serious threats against her life," the Norwegian Nobel Committee acknowledged in its news release.

"When authoritarians seize power, it is crucial to recognize courageous defenders of freedom who rise and resist," the committee said in a statement.

"Democracy 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, but must always be defended — with words, with courage and with determination.

President Donald Trump publicly campaigned to receive the Nobel Peace Prize prior to announcing the brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hamas earlier this week, with Nobel Committee Chair Jørgen Watne Frydnes claiming the winner had already been selected on October 6, two days before his announcement of the peace deal in the Middle East.

“In the long history of the Nobel Peace Prize, I think this committee has seen many types of campaign, media attention,” Frydnes said, without naming Trump, via the New York Post. “We receive thousands and thousands of letters every year of people wanting to say what, for them, leads to peace."

“This committee sits in a room filled with the portraits of all laureates and that room is filled with both courage and integrity. So we base only our decision on the work and the will of Alfred Nobel,” he added.

Bill Handel