Trump’s push for peace prize won’t sway us, says Nobel committee

US President Donald Trump’s obsession with winning the Nobel Peace Prize next month may have hit a hitch — the stubborn independence of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which insists to AFP that it cannot be swayed.

Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has made it clear he wants the prestigious accolade, which his Democratic predecessor, former president Barack Obama, won to the surprise of many shortly after taking office in 2009.

The 79-year-old has taken every opportunity to say he “deserves it,” claiming to have ended six wars, even though those in Ukraine and between Israel and Hamas in Gaza — which he says he wants to resolve — continue to rage.

“Of course, we do notice that there is a lot of media attention towards particular candidates,” the secretary of the committee, Kristian Berg Harpviken, tells AFP in an interview in Oslo.

“But that really has no impact on the discussions that are going on in the committee,” he says. “The committee considers each individual nominee on his or her own merits.”

This year’s laureate will be announced on October 10.

Trump has backed up his claim that he deserves the prize by pointing out that several foreign leaders, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev, have either nominated him or backed his nomination.

However, they would have to have been extremely quick, or prescient, given that nominations for this year’s prize had to be submitted by January 31, just 11 days after Trump took office.

In July, Netanyahu told Trump he had nominated the president for the prize, giving him the letter he had sent to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

“To be nominated is not necessarily a great achievement. The great achievement is to become a laureate,” Berg Harpviken says. “You know, the list of individuals who can nominate is quite long.”