There is nervousness in the air this final pre-election weekend in Scotland. Saturday 1er May, Angus Robertson has just passed a Green City Councilor in a stairwell in Georgia, a working-class area of Edinburgh, west of the political capital of Scotland. “I will stay, in case he takes our brochures”, slips the SNP candidate for the constituency of Edinburgh Center, one of the most contested for the May 6 elections to renew Holyrood, the “devolved” Scottish Parliament.
The stake is considerable, at the scale of Scotland as that of the United Kingdom: if it obtains the majority of the seats, that is to say 65 deputies, the independence party – which holds for the moment 61 -, has promised more social assistance and a substantial salary increase for caregivers. But, above all, he will have sufficient legitimacy to demand a second independence referendum in London, seven years after that of 2014. At the time, 55.3% of Scots preferred to stay in the UK. But since then there has been Brexit, 62% rejected north of the Tweed, and the situation has radically changed, wants to believe the SNP.
The Greens are not the most threatening in Edinburgh Center, a very bourgeois constituency, with pockets of poverty around the city center. But all votes count: in 2016, Ruth Davidson, the former leader of the Scottish Conservatives, had stolen the place from the SNP with just 610 votes in advance. She does not represent herself: it is a young Tory city councilor, Scott Douglas, who has joined the ranks and faces the experienced Angus Robertson, ex-MP in Westminster and former deputy leader of the independence party.
The popularity of Nicola Sturgeon
At national level, faced with conservatives whose only argument is to preserve the Union (“I want to do everything to convince people to avoid a new referendum”, Douglas Ross, the leader of the Scottish Tories, insisted again during a press briefing on Friday April 30), the SNP is in the lead despite fourteen years in power and a mixed record.
Its leader, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, is enjoying unprecedented popularity due to her controlled handling of the pandemic. But the legislative campaign has so far run out of steam: the Prime Minister has fled journalists, and activists have only started door to door in mid-April, because of health restrictions. The polls have weakened in recent weeks, giving only the gain of an additional seat to the SNP on May 6, according to a summary of the polls carried out by the BBC between April 23 and 30.
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