A record nationalist majority in seats. A first minister still one seat short of the number that actually matters most to him.
The dust has more or less settled on this year’s Holyrood election now, and the headline figure worth sitting with properly is this: nationalist parties collectively hold more seats in the Scottish Parliament than at any point since devolution began, somewhere in the range of seventy-three to eighty-three depending on which specific final count you are reading, a genuinely historic result by that particular measure. And yet John Swinney, having just delivered exactly that record outcome, still finds himself governing from a position that falls short of the clean, outright SNP majority his own party had spent months building its entire campaign strategy around.
This is, I think, one of the more interesting tensions in Scottish politics right now, and one that deserves more careful unpacking than most of the immediate post-election coverage has managed. The SNP itself, on its own, landed somewhere in the low-to-mid sixties in seat count, comfortably the largest single party but still several seats shy of the sixty-five needed to govern outright, meaning Swinney’s ability to actually deliver on his own explicit campaign pledge, treating a majority as a mandate for a second independence referendum, has been denied by the very electorate that simultaneously handed the pro-independence bloc as a whole its strongest parliamentary position in Holyrood’s entire history.
The Scottish Greens, meanwhile, appear to have had a genuinely strong night, adding meaningfully to the pro-independence total even as the SNP itself essentially held steady rather than growing. That detail matters enormously for how the coming parliamentary term actually functions, since Swinney will now, in all likelihood, need to build some form of working arrangement with the Greens specifically to translate the pro-independence bloc’s numerical strength into any actual governing majority, a dynamic considerably more complicated than the clean, unilateral mandate his own party had originally been campaigning to secure.
I think what this result actually tells us, read carefully rather than simply through whichever headline framing suits a given commentator’s prior position, is that Scottish voters have delivered a genuinely split verdict: broad, arguably growing sympathy for independence as an eventual constitutional destination, distributed across multiple different parties rather than concentrated cleanly behind the SNP’s specific electoral machine, alongside real, documented frustration with the SNP’s own governing record specifically, on health waiting times, on housing, on the day-to-day delivery voters increasingly seem to be judging the party on regardless of its constitutional positioning.
Anas Sarwar’s Scottish Labour, for its part, ran a campaign deliberately built around avoiding the constitutional question almost entirely, focusing instead on exactly those delivery failures, and by most accounts that strategy produced a genuine, meaningful recovery for a party that had been reduced to a genuinely marginal Holyrood presence for the better part of a decade. Whether that specific strategy, refusing to litigate independence directly and simply outcompeting the SNP on bread-and-butter governance, represents a genuinely sustainable long-term approach for unionist politics in Scotland, or simply a useful tactical positioning for this one particular electoral cycle, remains, I think, a genuinely open question worth watching closely over the coming parliamentary term.
What happens next constitutionally is, in some ways, the more immediately consequential question. Swinney has already signalled he intends to treat this pro-independence bloc’s combined numerical strength as some form of mandate for pursuing a second referendum, a position Westminster, under Starmer, has previously and repeatedly rejected outright. That specific collision, between a Holyrood majority built from multiple parties rather than one, and a Westminster government showing no obvious sign of shifting its own settled position, is going to define a great deal of Scottish political coverage over the coming months, and I intend to keep tracking it carefully rather than assuming either side’s current public position necessarily survives the actual negotiating pressure still to come.
There is also a more immediate, practical governing question worth flagging before this term even properly begins. A Swinney government built on a working arrangement with the Greens rather than a clean outright majority will need to actually negotiate its legislative programme, budget by budget, vote by vote, in a way a majority government simply does not, and I think the specific texture of that negotiation, how much the Greens are able to extract in exchange for their support, how much friction it introduces into otherwise routine government business, deserves considerably closer coverage than it has received amid all the broader constitutional framing dominating the post-election discussion so far.
I suspect the next several months of Holyrood coverage will tell us as much about the practical realities of minority and coalition-adjacent governance in Scotland as it does about the headline constitutional question everyone, myself included in this very entry, keeps reaching for first. Both threads matter, and I intend to keep pulling on both as this new parliamentary term actually gets underway.
For now, though, the headline figure remains the one worth sitting with properly: the most pro-independence Holyrood in the parliament’s entire history, delivered by an electorate that simultaneously denied its own largest party the clean, unambiguous mandate that same party had spent months explicitly campaigning around. Scottish politics, once again, has managed to deliver a result considerably more layered and considerably more genuinely interesting than either side’s preferred simple narrative fully captures.
More from this author at Morag Sinclair, prat.uk.