Nicola Sturgeon to resign as Scotland's first minister

- Support for independence is now lower than when she took the reigns. That by itself must count as failure on the SNP's own terms.

- Lost the "once in a generation" referendum and then refused to accept the result, campaigning for years for a second referendum she had already agreed wouldn't happen.

- Made zero progress on reducing subsidy dependency on England, creating the widespread impression that the SNP doesn't really want Scotland to be independent. Many other specific issues around independence also have been ignored despite the lack of answers being one of the issues causing their referendum loss.

- Done everything possible to piss off the neighbours across the border, like encouraging anti-English rhetoric that would be considered grotesquely racist if there was a skin color difference.

And in non-referendum areas:

- Poverty and poor health are worse in Scotland than England.

- She said she wanted to be judged on closing education gaps, but they didn't close.

- The economy is worse.

- Social policy is totally reactive. Under Sturgeon the SNP just tended to copy whatever England was doing but making it more extreme, without any obvious guiding principles. The gender self-ID fiasco is a good example of that. 2/3rds of voters are against it and Salmond says it's done more damage to the independence campaign than anything else (which says a lot about the strength of that campaign). She didn't think through the consequences and when faced with the reality of what it means in the Isla Bryson case, flailed around and couldn't articulate a coherent response. Total incompetence.

- Scotland has quietly developed a reputation for corruption and weak institutions, with problems you don't see elsewhere in the country.

The nasty Salmond/Sturgeon affair was one example, and her resignation is likely triggered by the police finally starting to investigate where £600,000 of donated money was apparently embezzled to. The way she "can't recall" that her husband lent over £100,000 to the SNP is another symptom of this sort of thing.

But to address your point: why? They knew when voting that there was likely to be a referendum on the EU in the future, the pressure for that had been building for years, and Scotland has its own eurosceptics that wanted to remain in the UK and also leave the EU.

Also, the idea of an "independence" movement that wants to immediately give up that independence to join another union seems like a contradiction. The SNP is the Scottish Nationalist Party but the EU hates nationalists, they routinely say things like this:

https://twitter.com/EU_Commission/status/900356981461884928

> 'Nationalism is like alcoholism: a short period of exaltation followed by a long period of headaches' - @TimmermansEU against nationalism.

If the SNP was a coherent party with a principled set of positions it would have needed to resolve this contradiction at some point, but like many other such contradictions they never did. It doesn't act like a nationalist party, it acts like a bog standard centre left party (hard left on id politics), with relatively little interest in any theory of nations.