Angela Merkel in April 2015. PHOTO: Creative Commons/Initiative D21 on Flickr
Odds on who’s going to win the Nobel Peace Prize, to be awarded on Friday, are so hard to make that one could easily arbitrage various bookmakers. I’m not a betting man, but I hope the prize goes to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. She’s the favorite now, with average odds of about 6-1, and she deserves to win.
The field is strong. It includes Pope Francis, who this year helped restore relations between the U.S. and Cuba; the Russian investigative newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which did a great job covering Russia’s hybrid war in eastern Ukraine; and Congolese gynecologist Denis Mukwege, who helps women gang-raped in the course of his country’s civil war. Other contenders are Mussie Zerai, the Eritrean priest who helps save refugees in the Mediterranean by taking their coordinates by satellite phone and passing the information on to the European naval rescue units; and the Japanese pacifists who want to preserve Article 9 of the country’s constitution, which declares Japan demilitarized.
Yet I would argue that no one has done as much as Merkel this year for peace, and for people fleeing war.
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