The next Holyrood parliament

One of the most persistent category errors in Scottish political commentary is to treat elections to the Scottish Parliament as if they were Westminster elections. They are not. And yet, almost every discussion of the next contest still gravitates towards a familiar and rather exhausted set of questions: who will be the largest party, and who will finish second and thus lead the opposition? These questions are not irrelevant, but in a proportional system they are only the beginning of the analysis, not its conclusion.

Let us assume, for the sake of argument, a parliament composed as follows: SNP 54, Reform 30, Labour 16, Conservatives 12, Greens 9 and Liberal Democrats 8. On those numbers, an SNP–Green partnership reaches 63 seats and therefore falls short of the 65 required for an outright majority. The comfort of a pro-independence majority, which has structured much of the political debate since 2011, would disappear. What follows, however, is not remotely as straightforward as some commentary implies.

If the SNP remain clearly the largest party on 54 seats, they would possess the strongest constitutional and political claim to attempt government formation. That is not a partisan argument but a structural one. In proportional systems across Europe, the largest party is normally given the first opportunity to assemble a governing arrangement. The crucial point, however, is that being largest does not equate to governing alone. A majority must still be secured, whether formally through coalition or informally through negotiated support. On the projected numbers, the SNP cannot govern with the Greens alone and would require the backing, abstention or participation of at least one additional party. It is difficult to imagine Labour, the Conservatives or the Liberal Democrats entering into such an arrangement without extracting a significant price, not least on the constitutional question, which would almost certainly involve postponing or deprioritising independence.

The arithmetic constrains the alternatives just as tightly. Labour, the Conservatives, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens together command only 45 seats, far short of a majority. Any non-SNP administration would therefore require either SNP participation or Reform’s support. If the SNP fail to assemble a viable arrangement, Reform, as the second-largest party on 30 seats, might reasonably expect to be invited to explore its own options. Yet Reform’s path to 65 would be even narrower. To construct a majority, it would have to combine not merely with Labour and the Conservatives but also with either the Liberal Democrats or the Greens, producing an ideologically incoherent and politically fraught alliance. The mere existence of such theoretical combinations does not make them practicable.

It is, of course, possible that the SNP secure a pro-independence majority, either alone or in partnership with the Greens. Should that occur, the question resolves itself in conventional fashion. But if they do not, the field narrows rapidly. A Labour–Liberal Democrat axis, even supplemented by the Greens, remains well short of the threshold. A broad anti-SNP front would require Reform, and that in turn would present reputational and strategic dilemmas for parties seeking to define themselves against both nationalism and populism.

This leaves the option that Holyrood has already tested once: minority government. Between 2007 and 2011, the SNP governed without a majority, negotiating support issue by issue and securing annual budgets through ad hoc agreements. Such an arrangement may lack the clarity of a formal coalition, but it can function effectively provided there is a willingness to bargain. In proportional systems, minority cabinets are not aberrations but instruments, and their stability depends less on headline seat totals than on parliamentary discipline and a shared interest in avoiding repeated elections.

The deeper lesson is that the fixation on rankings, while understandable, obscures the more consequential question of who can work with whom. In a chamber where no single bloc commands 65 seats, politics becomes an exercise in coalition arithmetic and strategic restraint. Parties must decide whether they are prepared to trade policy concessions for influence, whether they will tolerate a minority administration to avoid empowering a rival and how far they are willing to compromise on core objectives. Holyrood’s design anticipates precisely this kind of negotiated politics. The challenge for Scotland is not the mathematics, which are clear enough, but the political culture required to operate within them.