The former first minister was first elected as a regional MSP for Glasgow in the first term of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.<\/p>\n
But speaking at an event in her Glasgow Southside constituency as she launched her memoir, Frankly, Ms Sturgeon said she felt she had \u201cfailed\u201d because she was unable to win her constituency.<\/p>\n
By that point, she said, the future first minister had lost three constituency races \u2013 in 1992 and 1997 for Westminster and the Holyrood seat she contested in 1999.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wasn\u2019t particularly happy in myself in the first term of Parliament,\u201d she said at the event as part of the Govanhill Book Festival.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis dream I\u2019d had about being a politician was going to be realised and yet I felt I\u2019d failed because I hadn\u2019t won the constituency.\u201d<\/p>\n
She added: \u201cI was really conflicted for the first few years and, of course, there was lots of teething problems with the Parliament as a whole, so it wasn\u2019t the happiest time in my political career.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess I got to the end of that first session of the Scottish Parliament, not really sure whether I wanted to spend that much more time in politics.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat obviously changed and the rest is history, but that was a moment where I could easily, I think, have taken a step out and done something different.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ms Sturgeon would go on to win the seat, which was originally named Glasgow Govan, in 2007 before announcing her plans to step down as an MSP at next year\u2019s election.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The former first minister was first elected as a regional MSP for Glasgow in the first term of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":328748,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8816],"tags":[748,1102,4884,712,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-328747","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-edinburgh","8":"tag-britain","9":"tag-edinburgh","10":"tag-great-britain","11":"tag-scotland","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114994996983392502","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=328747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/328747\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/328748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=328747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=328747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=328747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}