FORTY-FIVE MPs, 64 MSPs, eight elections victories in a row, the highest membership figures of all parties in Scotland and polls showing they are still the most popular party in the nation. When you think about it factually, there are worst places to be as a party that has been ruling Scotland for a decade.

Humza Yousaf – who emerged victorious in the SNP leadership election and was voted in as Scotland’s new first minister yesterday – could legitimately be in a great mood. After all, he is inheriting a party that, for the moment, is an extraordinary winning machine and a dominant force in Scottish politics.

In his speech in the Scottish Parliament yesterday, he said that he recognised he had big shoes to fill coming after Nicola Sturgeon, but leadership meant running towards a challenge instead of avoiding it – but this is going to be an almighty challenge.

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After long weeks of campaigning and dozens of hustings, there is no honeymoon period for the man who has become the youngest Scottish first minister ever, and also the first person of colour and the first Muslim to ever lead the country.

The country didn’t make a lot of fuss over this, which I see as great news. It is just normal now to have political leaders from minorities and you won’t see many people criticising this. But I think the main reason why is because citizens want answers and solutions now. They are more interested in seeing how he is going to deliver on public services, unite his party after what has been widely seen as a vigorous – at times acrimonious – leadership contest, and be the change that he claims to be, despite framing himself as the continuity candidate to replace Sturgeon. There are so many pressing issues – skyrocketing bills and rents, low wages, access to healthcare, the climate emergency, the list goes on.

You will see it in most newspaper columns: Common wisdom is that the SNP, now a shadow of the great big party they used to be in the aftermath of the independence referendum, are bound to descend into full meltdown and crash and burn in the next general elections.

Of course, those analyses are not completely unfounded. It would be complete denial to claim – after the row on membership figures that led to some high-profile resignations and showed that the party has been losing a significant number of paid-up members – that all is well and there is nothing to see.

Moreover, opinion polls do show that while the SNP are still ahead of their rival parties, there is dissatisfaction in Scotland about the state of public services, particularly the NHS. The mood in the country is gloomy, and I have no doubt that the new first minister is well aware of the urgency to put forward solutions for the troubled times we are living in.

So Yousaf is faced with the challenge of proving that he is up to the difficult task of steering Scotland out of a crisis while maintaining the SNP’s strong electoral position. Good luck to him, as it seems that anything short of hegemony is going to be interpreted as failure.

This is not new. Just a couple of years ago, some commentators said that the SNP failed because they didn’t manage to get an overall majority at the Scottish Parliament. Of course, we all know it is very difficult to obtain, so anything even close to a majority is a huge achievement. In 2017, too, despite winning the biggest number of constituencies by far, the SNP’s performance was described as poor.

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It is true that politics is all about trends. If you start from a position of dominance, then even a slightly poorer performance is going to prompt the question: Is it the beginning of the end? The SNP have been performing so well in terms of polling and election results that I struggle to see how they could get even higher. Yousaf is having to defend the SNP’s incredible legacy of having their second-ever-highest number of parliamentarians both in Holyrood and in Westminster and more than a third of Scottish council’s seats. The pressure is on!

This is why other parties, particularly Labour, are seeing an opportunity. Polls after polls are showing they are on the rise and likely to be in power at Westminster after the next General Election.

They are placing their bets on about 20 “Tartan wall” seats, in the hope that pro-independence voters will vote or Keir Starmer's (below) Labour instead of the SNP because they prioritise ousting the Tories. Even more so since the new first minister expressed concerns about using the vote as a de facto referendum.

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Therefore, I believe that in the next few months, an important question for the new first minister to answer will be how to keep independence relevant when bread-and-butter issues occupy most people’s minds. How can we keep the constitution in the conversation during an unprecedented cost of living crisis?

In times of crisis, I find it difficult to project myself into a better future, yet I feel that now is the time for big, daring ideas to improve society. These past few months, I have been working on the second issue of La Revue Écossaise, the francophone magazine about Scotland I co-founded last year and am currently editing. The theme we have chosen is L’Écosse laboratoire, which will touch on Scotland’s revolutionary ideas and innovation and how they have inspired the world. I took an interest in New Lanark and Robert Owen and how his utopian socialist philosophy travelled the world. With this context, I always ended up asking the people I interviewed: Does Scotland still offer these new perspectives to inspire the world?

They all answered yes, and this is precisely what the independence movement is about. Offering an alternative, not just for the sake of it, but to create a fairer nation, open to the world. Even with the many immediate challenges facing Scotland, independence will remain an exciting prospect to explore.