Dhe former Scottish Justice and Health Minister Humza Yousaf will lead the Scottish National Party (SNP), which has so far formed a coalition government with the Greens in the regional government in Edinburgh. Yousaf is also expected to take over as prime minister (Estonia Minister) this Tuesday, succeeding Nicola Sturgeon, who has led the party and government for nearly nine years. The Green coalition partner had previously let it be known that he did not want to extend the coalition in any case. However, Yousaf was most likely seen as the successor candidate who could continue Sturgeon’s policies; his election can therefore be taken for granted.
Sturgeon’s departure has revealed a double crisis for Scottish nationalists – in their self-confidence and in their self-image. The party’s ability to mobilize and its self-confident appearance suffered above all from the fact that it had to be surprisingly announced at the beginning of the ballot that the party had significantly fewer members than assumed and claimed by the party leadership.
Sturgeon’s husband, Peter Murell, who had previously supported his wife as a kind of general secretary of the SNP, therefore gave up this post. He had to admit that instead of the previously assumed 100,000 members, only 72,000 would participate in the election of the new party leadership. The damage to Scottish Nationalists is not only the much reduced size of membership dues, but also a loss of credibility and damage to their claim to be the largest and most powerful party in Scotland.
Sturgeon led the SNP to the left
The second crisis, which was at least as serious, became clear through the different positions of the three successor candidates. Ever since the beginning of its upswing around 50 years ago, the SNP had seen itself as a centre-left party, but had combined this with Scottish regional patriotism. Through her constant criticism of alleged British paternalism, she tried to appeal to supporters of all political tendencies.
After the 2016 successful British exit referendum from the EU, Sturgeon made a vehement new attempt to have the Scots, who had decided against independence in 2014 by almost 55 percent, vote in a new referendum for an independent Scotland, which they imagined in Scotland the EU should return. It failed to secure the approval of the central London government for a new vote, nor the approval of the British courts.
In order to gain the support of young Scottish voters, Sturgeon took the SNP far to the socio-political left and established, for example, a very far-reaching gender change bill. These positions did not go unchallenged in the inner-party election campaign for her successor. While Yousaf, who has already held several ministerial posts in the regional government in Edinburgh, defended Sturgeon’s socially progressive and Scottish separatist course and promised to continue it, his competitor Kate Forbes, previously Scottish Finance Minister, presented a different strategy and different content.
Forbes, a Christian fundamentalist, rejected the SNP’s previous positions on gender politics and also advocated a different, less confrontational approach to the independence issue. The third candidate, Ash Regan, on the other hand, put Scottish independence aspirations at the center of her campaign. After his election, Yousaf said he would continue efforts for an independent Scotland. He acknowledged that election campaigns could be “hurting at times” but pledged that the party would continue to think of itself as “one family”.
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