Barack Obama ‘not boosted’ by Nobel Prize award as expected

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to US president Barack Obama in 2009 failed to live up to expectations, says the former secretary of its committee.

Geir Lundestad has written in his memoir that the committee had expected the prize to boost Obama, but was instead fiercely criticised in the US, where people argued that the president had not been in his position long enough to have had an impact worthy of the award.

“Even many of Obama’s supporters believed that the prize was a mistake,” Lundestad wrote. “In that sense, the committee didn’t achieve what it had hoped for.”