The winner of this year’s Nobel peace prize is to be named on Friday morning, putting an end to a period of speculation and volatile betting. Past experience, however, suggests that bookies’ odds are an unreliable guide: the Oslo-based prize committee has shown itself to be leak-proof, inscrutable and quite capable of springing surprises, such as the award to Barack Obama only a few months into his tenure, and to the European Union in 2012, Guardian reports.
After Pope Francis for Vatican had played a key role in brokering the re-establishment of relations between the US and Cuba last December and Angela Merkel after opening her country’s doors to refugees is John Kerry and Mohammad Javad Zarif turns.
Guardian writes: Until the refugee crisis in Europe reached its climax over the summer, the US secretary of state and the Iranian foreign minister looked to be obvious favourites for the prize. Over two years of intensive diplomacy the two men crafted a deal on Iran’s nuclear programme that many had thought impossible.
In the course of countless late nights in a succession of European cities, during which Kerry and Zarif, representatives of two hostile nations, came to spend more time with each other than with any other foreign official, they overcame the enormous technical complexity of the issue and the entrenched opposition at home.
The UK Paper added: The deal has since been endorsed by the UN Security Council and survived critical scrutiny in the US and Iranian legislatures. It was a victory for tenacious diplomacy, and its supporters argue, with some justification, it averted another war in the Middle East as well as being a significant victory against nuclear proliferation. On the other hand, the agreement has yet to begin being implemented and is the subject of ongoing, bitter attack from US Republicans and the Israeli government.
Much will depend on whether the new majority on the Nobel committee minds offending these constituencies by awarding the Obama administration a second prize.
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