Greta, Zelensky or a chef? Today the Nobel Peace Prize will be awarded. After an inexplicable incident during an election campaign: the German AfD leader leaves the hospital

As the highlight of Nobel Prize week, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize will be announced next Friday. The Norwegian Nobel Committee will announce in Oslo at 11 a.m. who will receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Given the persistently tense world situation with the war in Ukraine, the climate crisis and other conflicts, there are sufficient candidates: this year there are 259 personalities and 92 organizations in the running. The total number of 351 nominees is the second highest ever. Traditionally, the Nobel institutions keep secret who is among the nominees for fifty years.

The Nobel Peace Prize is considered the most important political prize in the world. The prize is often awarded to one person or organization, but just like last year, the Nobel Committee can also award the prize to a maximum of three laureates at the same time.

Last year the prize went to the imprisoned Belarusian human rights lawyer Ales Byaljazki and to the human rights organizations Memorial from Russia and Center for Civil Liberties from Ukraine. They were honored, among other things, for their commitment to civil society in their home country, the right to criticize power and the protection of the fundamental rights of citizens.

Who gets the Nobel Prize is always a big secret. This leads to great speculation every year. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was recently seen as the favorite among gambling operators – but peace researchers consider this rather unlikely as Zelenskyy and Ukraine are still engaged in a defensive war against Russia.

Oslo Peace Research Institute Prio director Henrik Urdal’s annual favorites list includes human rights activists Narges Mohammadi from Iran and Mahbuba Seraj from Afghanistan. The director of the Stockholm peace research institute Sipri, Dan Smith, sees a Nobel Peace Prize for climate protection as a good idea – given the numerous extreme weather events this summer.

Such an award would focus on climate change and its link to insecurity and conflict, Smith told the German Press Agency ahead of this year’s announcement. His suggestion: half of the Nobel Prize could go to the Fridays for Future climate movement, initiated by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, and the other half could honor the important contribution of indigenous peoples to the subject, for example in the person of Brazilian chef Raoni Metuktire.

The Nobel Peace Prize is the only Nobel Prize that is not awarded in the Swedish capital Stockholm, but in the Norwegian capital Oslo. The winners in the categories medicine, physics, chemistry and literature had already been announced in Stockholm from Monday to Thursday. At the end of this year’s prize announcements, the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences will follow on Monday.

This year all prizes are worth eleven million Swedish kronor (approximately 910,000 francs), one million kronor more than in previous years. They are then traditionally awarded on December 10, the anniversary of the death of the Swedish dynamite inventor and prize donor Alfred Nobel (1833-1896). (sda/dpa)