The daughter of an electrician and a dental nurse who married at age 21 and 17, Nicola Ferguson Sturgeon was also precocious in passion. For politics. She was 16 when she joined the Scottish National Party (SNP) and says she was inspired by then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, by the Conservative Party.
Her dream was not to follow in the Iron Lady’s footsteps, but to fight them. “I hated everything she stood for,” said Nicola, who will be 51 in July and due for re-election on Thursday (6) later said.
“Many around me envisioned an immediate future of unemployment, and this gave me a strong feeling that it was wrong that Scotland was at the mercy of a Tory government that we had not elected,” a- he told BBC radio about his entry into politics.
Around Nicola were the children of workers, who studied in public schools and lived in housing estates in a village on the edge of a coal mine closed in the early 1960s, according to his biographer, David Torrance. The area became a suburb of Irvine, a town that flourished as the girl grew older, thanks to port activities.
Nicola made her debut at the polls before she turned 22 and, at 29, won the first election, securing a seat in the newly created regional parliament in 1999. She was surrounded by middle-aged men who unfairly dubbed her “nippy sweetie” (someone who annoys others for talking too much), censoring her for “trying to emulate the aggressive masculine approach,” he later said. “It’s a double standard. If I were a man, I wouldn’t receive any criticism.
His rise in the SNP was swift: in 2004 he became Alex Salmond’s deputy leader in the party and actually took over the acronym when he was elected to the British Parliament. In 2007, she became Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary for Health of Scotland. In 2011, he led the winning campaign that led the SNP to an unprecedented majority in the regional parliament.
Scottish journalist Peter Ross describes her as “the smart, sane and zealous little town girl,” with whom her compatriots have adopted an informal, almost familiar relationship. “She is rarely called Sturgeon. It’s Nicola or even “little Nicola”. “
Your success is not about being outgoing. Interlocutors say he is serious and straightforward, and expresses an empathy and confidence that apparently goes unheard of. He also has a self-deriving way of speaking, smiling and frowning “that dispels any accusation of arrogance or vanity,” one analyst wrote.
One of his main defeats, that of the plebiscite on Scottish independence in 2014, presented a great opportunity, when Prime Minister Alex Salmond resigned and led the party. Nicola took over the SNP and, a few days later, was chosen by the majority of the regional parliament as prime minister.
Two crushing victories followed. In 2015, the SNP won 56 of the 59 seats available for Scotland in the House of Commons (the equivalent of the House of Representatives) in the British Parliament. The following year, the acronym occupied the record of 59 of the 73 district seats in the regional parliament, consolidating Nicola’s leadership.
The party also marked his personal life. She met her husband – Peter Murrell, 56, current SNP executive chairman – at a party youth camp in 1988. Together since 2003, they married in 2010.
The couple have no children, but in 2016 Nicola said she miscarried in 2011. At the Sunday Times, she called the experience “painful” and said women, especially politicians , were unfairly judged for not having children.
“Some of us just don’t want to have them, some of us are concerned about the impact on our careers – and there is still a long way to go so that we don’t have to choose between one or the other. . And sometimes that just doesn’t happen, no matter how badly we want it, ”he said.
In 2012, he highlighted shoes and books as his great passions. “I always buy shoes – but not very expensive, because they are always destroyed by the cobblestones of Edinburgh,” he told the Daily Record.
On the books, he told the Guardian to love historical fiction and as a child to be enchanted by Nigel Tranter – a historian who studied castles and wrote novels about Scottish kings.
Nicola is trying to widen his margin to gain political capital and force a second referendum on Scottish independence – the polls close at 10 p.m. and the result is due on Saturday.
But it was news this year for winning an unusual election. In a poll of a dating app with 3 million users, the nationalist leader was chosen as the political figure most British singles would like to kiss.