It's Humza Yousaf, 38 who will turn next week, the new leader of the Scottish Independence Party of the SNP and the future prime minister of local government in Scotland.
He announced it to Edinburgh the apex of the same Snp, making public the results of the vote among the members to decide on the succession a Nicholas Sturgeon, who surprisingly resigned in February after almost a decade of almost unchallenged leadership in the northern UK nation.
Who is Yousaf: Glasgow graduate, from justice minister to health secretary
Yousaf born in Glasgow to a Pakistani father and a mother native of Kenya but of an Asian family, he is the first Scottish leader from a Muslim family. Graduated in political science at the University of Glasgow, he was also the local minister of Justice for three years and previously worked on Transportation. In his youth he was the leader of the Muslim Students' Union and an activist against the war in Iraq, but also firm in denouncing episodes such as the anti-American attack of September 11, 2001.
It will have to support the flags of the independence nationalism of Scotland in front of Rishi Sunak, unionist Tory prime minister at the helm of the British central government, himself the son of immigrant parents (in his case Indian and Hindu). Yousaf took 52,1 per cent of the vote in the final run-off, winning against her centre-right rival, Scottish Finance Minister Kate Forbes, and former minister Ash Regan. He will appear tomorrow at Holyrood, the Scottish parliament, where he should receive the confidence to be prime minister.
Following the announcement of his victory as leader of the Scottish National Party, Humza Yousaf said it was "difficult" to find the words to describe "how honored I am to be mandated by our membership of the SNP". Yousaf also said he feels "the luckiest man in the world" to be the leader of the SNP, a party he joined 20 years ago.
Towards a remodeling of independence
Having joined the independence cause of the Scottish National Party, he has so far been a staunch supporter of Sturgeon's strategy about independence. During the election campaign, however, he admitted the need to recalibrate times and ways of the separatist challenge, after failure of the attempt to appeal to the Supreme Court of London to obtain the placet of a second referendum. The party is grappling with the need to renew the currently stalled battle for secession from London, as well as to cope with polls that today credit support for independence at well below 50% (and declining) and a crisis of subscribers to the SNP (from 104 thousand and 72 thousand since December 2021) admitted only during the electoral campaign.
First act: a summit against poverty
Yousaf, who had the support of most MSPs and SNP MPs, had vowed to push forward the socially inclusive centre-left agenda that defined the Sturgeon era.
But during the campaign he distanced himself from his predecessor's key policies, including the plan to hold the next general election as a de facto referendum, and promised a more open style of government. In an interview published Monday before the announcement, he promised to hold a anti-poverty summit as his first act as prime minister, where experts could discuss the wealth taxes to fund support for the poorest people, after last week's data showed that the child poverty in Scotland it was at the same level as when the SNP first came to power in 2007.
