Jaak Madison, an Estonian far-right member of the European Parliament, has nominated the former US president, Donald Trump, for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“Due to the fact that nominees for the Nobel Peace Prize can also be nominated by members of parliaments, I used this opportunity,” Madison wrote on his Facebook page on 1 February, adding he did so a couple of hours before the deadline for nominations on 31 January.
“Donald Trump is the first president of the United States in the last 30 years, during whose tenure the country has not started any wars,” Madison said, justifying the suitability of the former US president in the application. “In addition, he has signed a number of peace agreements in the Middle East that have helped ensure stability and peace in the region.”
“I’m certainly not the only one to nominate this particular candidate, but as we know: the more nominators, the greater the likelihood of success,” the MEP said.
With regards to the “peace agreements”, Madison most likely refers to the Israel–United Arab Emirates normalisation agreement (the UAE became the third Arab country, after Egypt and Jordan, to agree to formally normalise its relationship with Israel), signed at the White House in September 2020. As for the wars, it is indeed, a fact, that no war was started during Trump’s tenure.
Madison’s party known for a similarly divisive rhetoric
Jaak Madison belongs to the Estonian Conservative People’s Party, also known as EKRE. The party, formerly in the Estonian government, is known in Estonia for a similarly divisive and polarising rhetoric as Trump. The party’s leaders, Martin and Mart Helme, have also expressed their admiration for the former American president and publicly questioned the legality of the last US presidential election.
Madison entered the frontline politics in 2015, when elected to the Estonian parliament as an EKRE MP. In a blog post, published before the election, he justified the practices of the Nazi regime. “In my eyes, fascism is an ideology that consists of quite a few positive and necessary nuances to preserve the nation state,” he said.
He was elected to the European Parliament from Estonia in 2019, gathering 22,823 votes – an impressive number in a country of 1.3 million. He is the first EKRE party member to have become a MEP. In 2019, Madison called for a “final solution” against immigrants in Europe.
Donald Trump was the 45th president of the United States from 2017 to 2021. He lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, who received 306 electoral votes against Trump’s 232.
The Nobel Peace Prize is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Swedish industrialist, inventor and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel. Since March 1901, it has been awarded annually to those who have “done the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses”.
Cover: Jaak Madison (photo by Jaak Madison’s official Facebook page) and Donald Trump (photo by Gage Skidmore, shared under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 2.0 licence). The collage by Estonian World.
