Why Russian Alexeï Navalny will not win the Nobel Peace Prize

He died for his ideas after giving a dictator a cold sweat. The charismatic Russian dissident Alexeï Navalny, who died on February 16 in an Arctic penal colony for having been the main opponent of Vladimir Putin, has all the ideal profile for a Nobel Peace Prize, the 2024 winner of which will be chosen this Friday.

He was also last week, alongside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, among the bookmakers’ favorites. But the punters changed their minds. Because, barring a last-minute sprain, he won’t have it.

Two cases and a change

The Nobel committee’s regulations do not allow – or rather no longer – to award a prize posthumously. Until 1974, the wise men (Swedes in general, but Norwegians regarding the Nobel Peace Prize) could designate a laureate posthumously provided that the latter had been nominated before February 1 of the current year.

In the history of the committee, two men have been distinguished without being able to enjoy this honor during their lifetime: Erik Axel Karlfeldt, a Swedish poet, Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1931, and Dag Hammarskjöld, another Swede. Secretary General of the United Nations at the time of his death in September 1961 in a plane crash, he was named Nobel Peace Prize a few weeks later.

Other dissidents in favorites

For fifty years therefore, the committee’s prizes have been reserved for the living. Except in the – conceivable – case of a death which would occur between the allocation, traditionally proclaimed at the beginning of October, and the official delivery, during December. This rule only suffered from an understandable exception for an improbable case. That of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Medicine, the Canadian Ralph Steinman: the committee had not been informed of his death, which occurred three days before. Nothing like this for Alexeï Navalny, whose death had a worldwide impact.

In these troubled times, however, other dissidents could take up the torch that a premature death may have blown from the mortal enemy of the Russian president. Among the 286 candidates – including 89 organizations – for the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize, according to the bookmakers, figure prominently in the Uyghur economist Ilham Tohti, imprisoned for life by the Chinese authorities, and the Belarusian opponent Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaïa, who lives in exile in Lithuania.