Alex Salmond was a singular political talent and one of the privileged few politicians who utterly and irreversibly reshaped their nation’s politics. His legacy was immediately contested upon news of his passing, sparking arguments throughout this week. Not everything he set in motion before his death has concluded, and many of those involved remain active political participants. I’ll leave it to history to judge that legacy and his contemporaries.

But politics moves ever on, and his death poses substantial questions about the future of the Alba Party and the Scottish independence movement now that their greatest modern champion has passed.

To say that Alex Salmond was the Alba Party would be reductive. Alba have a larger membership than the Scottish Conservatives and have had representation at Westminster, Holyrood, and in local government. However, it is objectively accurate to say that the Alba Party was Alex Salmond’s party and would never have existed without him, that his strengths were Alba’s strengths, and his weaknesses were Alba’s weaknesses.

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Mr Salmond was the consummate political insurgent. The greatest need of an outsider party is the oxygen of media attention. As he demonstrated repeatedly since winning office in 1987, if there was one thing he knew how to do, it was to get that attention and utilise it to build a party brand. The other pro-independence parties founded by ex-SNP figures in the run-up to the 2021 Scottish Parliament elections made no splash whatsoever, but Alba had Mr Salmond.

But he was also deeply unpopular. Mr Salmond was known as a Marmite politician during his leadership of the SNP, and two days before the referendum in 2014, a Survation poll found that while 48% of Scots trusted Mr Salmond, 51% did not. Since then, his reputation has taken a hammering. Savanta UK’s final General Election poll on July 2 just 16% of Scots had a favourable opinion of Mr Salmond, with 66% unfavourable, a lower rating politician measured except Boris Johnson.

Mr Salmond’s political strategy for Alba was predicated on peeling away pro-independence voters because the SNP weren’t doing enough to achieve independence, but that strategy failed to win a single election. They won just 1.66% of the 2021 Scottish Parliament election list vote, 0.7% of first preferences at the 2022 Local Elections, and just 0.5% of the vote in July’s UK General Election. Every councillor and MP who has defected to Alba has been heavily defeated.

Alba will not melt away like snow in the spring, but how long can the party survive chronic defeat without its talismanic leader? By July this year, just 4% of independence supporters trusted Alba to do more than the SNP to campaign for independence. Unless they can find a leader with mass appeal among independence supporters, who can convince them that Alba is the party best-positioned to achieve independence, I suspect they will struggle to survive past the next Holyrood elections.

Ultimately, Alba’s future and that of the Scottish independence movement are much less about personalities and individual politicians and much more about the structural challenges that face Scottish secessionism.

Last month, I spoke at an Edinburgh University conference marking the tenth anniversary of the independence referendum. Reflecting on the referendum period and the years since, I argued that the 2014 referendum was enabled not just by the SNP’s spectacular majority or Mr Salmond’s tactical mastery but by an opening of what scholars of political contention call the political opportunity structure: the aspects of governing regimes that offer openings for movements like the Scottish independence movement to advance their cause, or constraints that prevent them from doing so.

In the aftermath of the 2011 election, not only did a unique, secessionist parliamentary majority establish a mandate for a referendum, but the Scottish Government also had clear, majority public support for one. The 2011 Scottish Election Study found that 63% of Scots supported a referendum, with 29% opposed.

As importantly, the SNP found unexpected support for a referendum among pro-Union parties and politicians, particularly Scots in the UK Government who felt that denying a referendum would merely grow support for independence.

Other unionists saw a referendum as a tool to channel the Scottish independence movement and ultimately defeat it. All of this meant that a referendum was the most attractive option open to the UK Government, and it thus accepted the democratic arguments for one.

But the political opportunity structure for the Scottish independence movement slammed shut after 2014, and in response – by any measure, from membership to income – the past decade has seen a slow demobilisation of pro-independence resources, despite the ructions and day-to-day political froth of that period. Today, there is no single-party pro-independence Parliamentary majority, no majority in favour of another referendum, public exhaustion and little appetite for contentious politics, deep political polarisation, and fears on the part of the UK Government of a "neverendum" - not to mention the fear of defeat.

The conditions which led to the Edinburgh Agreement do not pertain nowiThe conditions which led to the Edinburgh Agreement do not pertain nowi (Image: Newsquest)

An electoral mandate was necessary but far from sufficient to secure the 2014 referendum, and that remains the case. Without the permissive political opportunity structure that prevailed in 2014, no route to independence exists that does not first run through a political or economic shock that significantly and permanently shifts the Scottish electorate in favour of independence, or the slog of incrementally growing that support. Electoral wheezes, like gaming the Holyrood electoral system to produce a "supermajority’" mean nothing without overwhelming public support.

Independence supporters might claim that this is undemocratic and unsustainable. In the long run, they may be right. But the fact is that the state sets the rules of engagement here, and the UK Government has closed off all but the narrowest path to independence.

Nobody played a more significant role in bringing the Scottish independence movement to the cusp of victory than Alex Salmond, but he struggled to get to grips with the post-2014 political environment just as much as his successors as First Minister. The question facing the independence movement is not which party or person is best placed to lead but how to engineer an environment in which the incentives for the UK Government to consent to a referendum outweigh the disincentives. Their future will be determined by strategic innovation, but in the fractured landscape of the post-2014 independence movement, such innovation is thin on the ground, on all sides.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social