Nicola Sturgeon is stepping down as Prime Minister of Scotland after more than eight years in office

02/15/2023

Updated at 11:45 am

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Nicola Sturgeon She will tender her resignation as Scottish Prime Minister on Wednesday after more than eight years in the job, an announcement she will make at a news conference this morning at 11am Edinburgh time.

The resignation of Sturgeon, who had been Prime Minister since November 2014, when she replaced Alex Salmond After the independence referendum lost by the Nationalists, it was a surprise.

The country’s longest-serving prime minister had announced a few months ago her intention to hold a new referendum on independence, a decision she justified by saying that conditions are now different from the previous referendum due to Brexit.

But last November, the UK Supreme Court delivered a unanimous ruling that, at least for the time being, the aspirations of Scottish nationalists, since, according to the justices, the Scottish parliament does not have the power to legislate to call an independence referendum because such a bill would be tied to directly concerned the future of the Union, and the decision could not be unilateral in the absence of agreement between Holyrood and Westminster.

This setback may be one reason for Sturgeon’s decision to leave office.