Nicola Sturgeon to step down as Scotland’s Chief Minister after more than eight years in office

Nicola Sturgeon She will present her resignation as Scotland’s chief minister on Wednesday after more than eight years in office, an announcement she will make at a press conference this morning at 11am Edinburgh time.

The resignation of Sturgeon, who has been chief minister since November 2014, when she replaced an alex salmond just after the independence referendum that the nationalists lost, it comes as a surprise.

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

But last November, the United Kingdom’s High Court threw overboard in a unanimous ruling, at least for the moment, the aspirations of Scottish nationalists, since, according to the judges, the Scottish Parliament does not have the power to legislate for the call for an independence referendum because such a bill would be directly related to the future of the union, and the decision, in the event of no agreement between Holyrood and Westminster, cannot be unilateral.

This setback could be one of the reasons for Sturgeon’s decision to leave office.