The current Scottish National Party leader made the announcement at a press conference this morning (15 February).
Nicola Sturgeon has resigned as Scotland’s first minister after eight years in the role. Speaking at a last-minute press conference in Edinburgh this morning (15 February), Sturgeon said her decision came from a “place of duty and love”.
“Since my very first moments in the job, I have believed the part of serving well would be to know, almost instinctively, when the time is right to make way for someone else,” she said. “In my head and in my heart I know that time is now.”
She continued: “While it will be tempting to see it as such, this decision is not a reaction to short-term pressures. This decision comes from a deeper and longer-term assessment. It might seem sudden, but I have been wrestling with it, albeit with oscillating levels of intensity, for some weeks.”
Sturgeon has held the position of first minister since 2014, when she took over from the SNP’s former leader Alex Salmond and became the first woman to hold either position.
Since then, she has secured numerous election successes and continued to push for Scottish independence, recently campaigning for a second referendum, which was later blocked by the supreme court.
On 25 May last year, she also became the longest-serving first minister of Scotland, surpassing the record set by her predecessor.
Sturgeon first became a member of the Scottish parliament in 1999, before becoming deputy leader of the SNP in 2004.
Since the start of her career Sturgeon has fought for the inclusion of women in mainstream politics.
In 2018, she launched a £500,000 fund to support local initiatives designed to improve representation of women’s achievements and “encourage more women to become involved in politics”.
And at the COP26 summit in Glasgow, she spoke passionately about the importance of female leadership in the fight against climate change and gender equality.
“To be blunt, I think while many of us are working within our domestic settings to empower women, to put women around the decision-making tables and to make sure women’s voices are heard more loudly, I don’t think that is happening in enough countries sufficiently across the world,” she said.
“The work we’re all doing, that we’ve heard expressed here today is important, but we must make that more than the sum of its parts by learning from each other, by supporting each other, by building the links and the bridges between each other and fundamentally by working to make sure that in five, 10, 20 years, the photograph of the world leaders taken at an event like this looks very different to how it looks today.”
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