Alex Salmond, the Scottish nationalist leader who promoted the independence referendum, has died International

2024-10-12 17:34:00

Alex Salmond (Linlithgow, 69), the politician who took the Scottish National Party (SNP) to the highest levels of power, died this Saturday. The former Scottish First Minister died instantly while giving a speech in North Macedonia.

“Independence will come sooner than many imagine,” Salmond assured EL PAÍS off the coast of Aberdeen in May 2021, while campaigning at the helm of his new party, ALBA. By then, the veteran fighter was no longer even a shadow of what he had become, but he was still capable of attracting hundreds of followers to his public events.

Acquitted of numerous accusations of sexual abuse and rape that had torn his already battered reputation to shreds, he had undertaken an all-out battle against his protégé and successor at the helm of the party and the government, Nicola Sturgeon, whom he accused of not being worthy to direct the destiny of Scotland.

Salmond, who took the Nationalist leadership in 1990, managed to lead the SNP from opposition, in a Scotland whose politics had been dominated for decades by the Labor Party, to a comfortable majority in the Holyrood Home Rule Assembly. From 2007 to 2014 he was first minister of the newly empowered Scottish government and fought to convince the Westminster parliament to allow the 2014 independence referendum.

The campaign has served to strengthen Scottish independence forces like never before, after 25 years of regained autonomy, but it has also viscerally divided the citizens of this nation. Finally, the votes against secession exceeded those who aspired to separate their destiny from that of the United Kingdom (55.30% against 44.70%).

After that defeat, which curbed separatist aspirations but consolidated the SNP as the majority political force in Scotland for many years, Salmond submitted his resignation.

In August 2018, the nationalist politician also announced that he would leave the party, shortly before the SNP leadership decided to expel him, in the face of serious allegations of sexual harassment and abuse made against him by several alleged victims.

Nine women, all Home Rule party workers, accused Salmond of attempting to sexually assault them from his position of authority. At public events, inside his official vehicle, at a nightclub and at his official residence in Bute House, where on up to eight occasions he reportedly tried to get them drunk before abusing them. Prosecution lawyers went so far as to define the former Scottish first minister, during the 10-day trial in Edinburgh, as a “sexual predator”. Salmond’s defense always stressed that the trial had been a “political bubble”.

In March 2020, a popular jury acquitted the politician of all charges.

annoying shadow

All these years, Salmond has been more of an annoying shadow than a threat to the leadership of the SNP, which under Sturgeon maintained undisputed political hegemony in Scotland. His party, ALBA, has never managed to divide the pro-independence vote with the strength predicted by the first polls.

However, personal vindication came in mid-2023, when a financial scandal involving the prime minister and her husband, Peter Murrell, ended up forcing Sturgeon to resign. The unleashed inflation, which caused a severe cost-of-living crisis, led many Scots to become disillusioned with the future independence referendum that Home Rule had promised them.

Paradoxically, Ash Regan, a member of Salmond’s ALBA party in the Holyrood Assembly, was the only one willing to follow Sturgeon when she proposed using a unilateral route leading to confrontation with London to push for a second independence referendum which was never held. he came to celebrate.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer described Salmond as “a monumental figure in Scottish and British politics” and underlined his devotion to the Scottish cause. “As prime minister, he cared about the preservation of heritage, history and culture [de esa nación]just as he defended the interests of the citizens he represented as a national and regional deputy,” Starmer recalled.