When Scottish Prime Minister Nicola Sturgeon emphasizes the stress of her job, specifically her position, this life in a cauldron of constant arguments, to justify why she is resigning from office, then for the second time in a short space of time it sounds like an alarm signal in ours Present.
Before Sturgeon, it was New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern who recently shed the burden of office and resigned. With astonishing frankness, two leading personalities come before the public, with words that are as much analysis as confession.
Sturgeon calls the secret incinerator of political livelihoods by name: “The nature and idiosyncrasy of modern political discourse bring so much higher intensity – may I call it brutality? – for the life of a politician with himself than in years past.”
The “burnout”, the total exhaustion of vitality, allows the decision to mature to leave the treadmill. It is safe to assume that Nicola Sturgeon, who as Prime Minister spent more than eight years fighting passionately for her life’s goal of Scottish independence, would not find it easy to throw in the towel.
In the office she is stepping down from, you simply have to give your all, she complains: is it still right for me and right for the country that I stay? Keep it that way? Her litany of grievances sounds familiar: A politician is never out of office; he has no privacy. She no longer wants to expose herself to this brutality.
Especially since societies only tear themselves apart from topic to topic. As was the case recently in Scotland with two questions: the “Gender Recognition Act”, which is intended to bring clarity to the definition of gender descriptions, and the question of whether a rapist who became a gender trans after his crime should go to a prison for men or for belong to women. Topics of any quality divide audiences. This wears down the political will, the private existence reports back, no longer wants to be the victim of such agendas.
Does the change in leadership mean that there will also be a change in Scotland’s fundamental issue: independence from the rest of Britain? Will it lose intensity or even cool down? It would be a win for Great Britain if the debate about Scottish independence were now also approaching its “burnout”.
