Power in Scotland will be the SNP’s to lose once again

HEAmong the many and varied contests on May 7, the biggest picks are also the easiest: Scotland.

If the polls and turnout in the previous contest in 2021 are taken into account, around 5.4 million Scots will vote and enough of them will vote to return the SNP or certainly an SNP-led government.

This will be the party’s fifth consecutive term since unseating Labor at Holyrood in 2007. John Swinney, who has been SNP leader since Humza Yousaf’s departure in 2024, will once again become first minister.

Alongside the long-running Unionist hegemony in the former Northern Ireland parliament, if the SNP lasts until that parliament expires in 2031 it will be the second-longest period of electoral dominance across the UK in more than a century. (They are angered by the Welsh Labor Party, which governed their nation from 1999 to 2026).

In fact, the peculiarities of the Scottish electoral system (mostly first-in-office, partly proportional representation, such as Westminster) mean that Swinney is likely to have either a small majority or close enough to a majority in the 129-seat parliament that he can complete his legislative program without too much compromise.

The extreme fragmentation of many of the SNP’s rivals, with Labor and Reform UK taking second place and the fact that the Greens, Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are still strong enough to win some seats, puts the underlying outcome beyond doubt. The SNP will divide and rule. Unionist or anti-SNP votes will matter, but it is such a kaleidoscope that even tactical voting becomes difficult.

Double drama all around? Not really. Support for the SNP in current polls is likely to be between 35 and 40 per cent of the vote. It will be high enough and well-distributed that its rivals will support it low and inefficiently, so that it should pick up around 60 constituency seats, plus perhaps a few more to get over the majority “threshold” of 65.

But this will hardly amount to a huge vote of confidence in the party and its long record, and in fact it will be lower than when Nicola Sturgeon led them to victory last time in 2021.

One fact is very clear. The 2026 vote will certainly not represent a mandate for the SNP to seriously campaign for a second independence referendum. The last one, in 2014, was based on a larger SNP vote, a clearer parliamentary majority and greater support for leave than was likely this time; and it will not be strong enough to make Sir Keir Starmer feel compelled to agree to the performative request.

Swinney also knows that poll support for independence must be above 60 percent to avoid a second devastating defeat.

While the SNP may think they have escaped the scandals and leadership traumas of the Alex Salmond, Sturgeon and Yousaf years, the collapse of the SNP-Green coalition and dissatisfaction with issues such as education and taxation, the reason they won is simply because they were lucky; They are not powerful or popular, but not all of their rivals are so lucky.

Labor recently looked certain to take power at Holyrood, complementing a landslide at Westminster in 2024. No more. Labour’s travails at the UK level have also crushed its support in Scotland.

Scottish leader Anas Sarwar cannot escape this contamination no matter how far he distances himself from the London Labor Party, including calling for Starmer to resign last month. It’s also fair to say that he hasn’t come up with a distinctive enough agenda to boost his own prospects.

He will likely be lucky enough to become the de facto leader of the opposition to Swinney’s government, although it is not an official position in the Scottish constitution. Who knows?

If it is a very bad night for Labor and it falls back into third place (if the Conservatives beat them to take second place in 2021), Starmer could outlast Sarwar as party leader.

This brings us to Reformation England, whose rise in Scotland as the party most skeptical of devolution, let alone independence or the EU, is surprising.

Like the Labor Party, they are around 15 per cent in the polls; this is much lower than scores in Wales or England; but a few years ago it would have been unimaginable that they could claim to be the main opposition to the SNP. As in the South, immigration and disillusionment with the Conservatives are the main reasons.

Like the rest of Britain, Nigel Farage’s followers have cannibalized a significant portion of the Tory vote while also destroying some working-class Labor support, particularly in the Central Belt.

But the Conservatives must be able to mobilize and hold on to many of their well-established strongholds in the Borders and North East Scotland to preserve some parliamentary representation and with it the hope of future revival.

Led by Russell Findlay, they are essentially still paying the price for the failures of the administrations of Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, as well as the lingering effects of the Brexit vote on “Remain” in Scotland.

Similarly, the Liberal Democrats, led by Alex Cole-Hamilton and with around 10 per cent of the vote, should win a handful of seats in Edinburgh, the Highlands and Islands: the Greens will do the same, relying on a more significant level of support in the proportional part of the vote.

Both parties have been involved in coalition administrations in the past; Labor Liberal Democrats in 1999-2007. The Scottish Greens, a pro-independence group, officially supported the SNP in the first independence referendum in 2007 and serve in government from 2021 to 2024 under the Bute House “power-sharing” agreement. It’s unlikely they’ll team up with others to eliminate Swinney.

So, as a side note, it is odd but essential to say that the outcome of the 2026 Scottish parliament, while superficially appearing solid and decisive, will have an air of provisional and “unfinished business”.

In reality this cannot be regarded as any expression of approval on the SNP’s record; It will be a reluctant victory; will not resolve the independence debate; and the atmosphere of change which exists in Scotland will remain incomplete.

Power will once again fall to the SNP for the next five years. But to whom?