What was the SNP and Greens’ deal and what happens now it has ended?

In February 2023, after suffering legal defeats over her independence plans and wearied by the rolling crises over NHS waiting lists, gender recognition reform and public sector pay, Sturgeon announced she was standing down as first minister and SNP leader.

Critics of the agreement feared its radicalism would play badly outside urban Scotland and alienate the centrist voters crucial to the election-winning coalition built up by Sturgeon’s predecessor, Alex Salmond.

The defection of Yousaf’s other leadership challenger, Ash Regan, to Salmond’s Alba party last October was an early sign of how unhappy SNP MSPs were becoming with the Green partnership.

Driven by Labour’s surge in Scottish opinion polls, which suggest the SNP could lose dozens of seats at the general election, Yousaf had already begun cutting the Greens off.

This will all be academic if he loses the vote of no confidence in his leadership tabled by the Scottish Conservatives immediately after he announced the end of the “coalition of chaos”, as Tory leader Douglas Ross describes it.

On Thursday afternoon, Scottish Greens described a sense of “disappointment and hurt” among party members after the announcement, which came “completely out of the blue” after the first minister’s supportive comments earlier in the week.