He was a giant of Scottish and British politics. Charismatic, visionary, but with a very controversial path at the end of his life, Alex Salmond died suddenly, at the age of 69, on Saturday October 12. Prime Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014, he was a passionate defender of independence and came very close to achieving this objective, having obtained from London a narrowly lost referendum in September 2014 – 45% of Scots then voted in favor independence.
Alexander Elliot Anderson Salmond was born on December 31, 1954 in Linlithgow, a town in the Central Belt, the most densely populated part of Scotland. Coming from a modest family, the young man won a place at the venerable University of St Andrews, north of Edinburgh, and began a career as an economist at the Royal Bank of Scotland. But he quickly turned towards politics. Very left-wing, he preferred to Labour, which was dominant in Scotland at the time, the Scottish National Party (SNP, independence party), of which this brilliant speaker would very quickly rise through the ranks.
In 1987, he won his first mandate: he was elected to the House of Commons for Banff and Buchan, in Aberdeenshire, an electoral constituency that was nevertheless rather conservative and pro-union with the rest of the United Kingdom. In 1990, he took the helm of the SNP and transformed this hitherto marginal formation, undermined by internal rivalries, into an election-winning machine. Renowned for his talents as a strategist, he moved away from his first loyalties to the left, defending a centrist and pragmatic policy. At the end of the 1990s, Alex Salmond took the opposite view of the fundamentalist separatists and supported the referendum in favor of “devolution” (regional autonomy) proposed by the government of Tony Blair in London.
Controversies and divisions
In 1999, a brand new Scottish regional Parliament, known as “Holyrood”, was created in Edinburgh, almost three hundred years after the old one was dissolved in 1707 following the Act of Union, with Westminster taking the ascendancy and becoming the Parliament of Great Britain. The moment is crucial: instead of extinguishing the desire for Scottish independence, devolution will on the contrary encourage them, with the SNP playing the role of regional institutions to the fullest. Alex Salmond led the party to its first victory at Holyrood in 2007, winning a relative majority. In 2011, the SNP won the absolute majority and gained so much legitimacy that in London, David Cameron accepted the principle of a referendum on independence.
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Source: Lemonde