John Swinney Re-elected as Scotland's First Minister Following SNP Election Losses

On 19 May 2026, John Swinney stood in the Holyrood debating chamber and accepted re-election as Scotland's First Minister for a second consecutive term. The SNP had just won its fifth straight Scottish Parliament election — a streak unmatched in devolution's 27-year history. Yet the applause masked a party losing ground, a parliament more fragmented than ever, and a country where the defining constitutional question remains frozen in place.

The Election: A Win That Felt Like a Loss

The 7 May election returned the SNP as the largest party with 58 seats, down six from the 64 it won in 2021 [1]. The party took 38.2% of the constituency vote and 27.2% of the regional list vote, both below its 2021 performance [2]. Turnout fell to 53.2%, down sharply from the 63.5% recorded five years earlier [3].

Source: Scottish Parliament

Data as of May 8, 2026CSV

The opposition benches tell the more dramatic story. Labour and Reform UK tied for second place with 17 seats each [3]. Reform's haul — won entirely through the regional list — marked its first-ever representation in the Scottish Parliament and mirrored the party's broader UK ascendancy [1]. The Scottish Greens returned a record 15 MSPs, including their first constituency victories in Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Southside [3]. The Scottish Conservatives collapsed to 12 seats, while the Liberal Democrats held 10 [3].

The result leaves no opposition bloc with a plausible path to forming government. Labour and the Conservatives together hold just 29 seats. Even a hypothetical grand coalition of all non-SNP, non-Green parties would reach only 56 — short of the 65 needed for a majority and exactly equal to the pro-independence bloc of SNP plus Greens [3].

The First Minister Vote: Three Rounds to Majority

Swinney's re-election as First Minister required three rounds of voting under Holyrood's exhaustive ballot system. In the final round, he secured 56 of 105 votes cast. Anas Sarwar (Labour) and Malcolm Offord (Reform UK) each received 17 votes, while Gillian Mackay (Greens) took 15 [4]. Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton was eliminated in round one with 10 votes; Conservative leader Russell Findlay fell in round two with 11 [4].

The arithmetic is revealing. The SNP holds 58 seats, but Swinney received only 56 votes in the decisive round — meaning at least two SNP MSPs either abstained or were absent. Meanwhile, the 56 votes he did receive exceed his party's own seat count if any Green MSPs voted for him in earlier rounds before their leader stood in the final ballot. Swinney himself framed the result around the broader pro-independence majority: "The people have again returned a pro-independence majority to this Parliament... I will ensure that the people have the right to decide on their own future" [4].

The SNP's Trajectory: Peak to Plateau to Decline

Source: Scottish Parliament

Data as of May 8, 2026CSV

The SNP's arc across devolution-era elections tells a clear story. The party rose from 35 seats in 1999 to a high-water mark of 69 in 2011, when Alex Salmond won an outright majority [2]. Since then, it has governed continuously but never again matched that peak — winning 63 seats in 2016, 64 in 2021, and now 58 in 2026 [2]. At the UK level, the 2024 general election was far more brutal: the SNP lost 38 of its 48 Westminster seats, retaining just nine [5].

How Does This Compare to Other Long-Governing Nationalist Parties?

The SNP's trajectory invites comparison with other nationalist or regionally dominant parties in Europe that held power for extended periods.

Fianna Fáil in Ireland governed for 61 of the 79 years between 1932 and 2011. Its collapse, when it came, was sudden and linked to a specific crisis: the party's vote share plummeted from 41.6% in 2007 to 17.4% in 2011 following the banking crisis and austerity, losing 58 of 77 seats [6]. Fianna Fáil has partially recovered since — it leads Ireland's current coalition government — but its era of single-party dominance ended permanently.

Convergència i Unió (CiU) in Catalonia governed the autonomous community for 23 consecutive years from 1980 under Jordi Pujol [7]. It was displaced in 2003 by a left-wing coalition, and the broader Catalan independence movement subsequently fragmented into multiple competing parties. CiU itself dissolved in 2015.

The SNP's position differs from both cases. Unlike Fianna Fáil, it has not suffered a single catastrophic electoral event tied to economic mismanagement. Unlike CiU, it has not fragmented. But the direction — a gradual erosion of vote share and seats over multiple cycles — carries its own risks, particularly if no single crisis event forces a reset.

Policy Record Under Scrutiny

Opposition leaders used the First Minister debate to catalog what they described as a record of failure across devolved public services.

Drug Deaths

Scotland recorded 1,017 drug-related deaths in 2024, a 13% decline from 2023 but still the highest per-capita rate in Europe at 19.1 deaths per 100,000 people [8]. The improvement proved short-lived: suspected drug deaths surged 31% in the first quarter of 2025–26, reaching 330 between December 2025 and February 2026 — an average of 25 per week [9].

Source: National Records of Scotland

Data as of Sep 1, 2025CSV

Education

Swinney, who served as Education Secretary from 2016 to 2024 before becoming First Minister, faces particular scrutiny on school attainment. His claim during First Minister's Questions that the poverty-related attainment gap had closed by 60% since 2009-10 was rated "Mostly False" by The Ferret, a Scottish fact-checking outlet [10]. The actual reduction in the gap for school leavers since 2016-17 was 1.1 percentage points [10]. Scottish Labour's Anas Sarwar has repeatedly argued that the SNP is "masking failure on widening access, with entrenched inequality and neglected colleges exposing a decade of missed opportunities" [11].

NHS Waiting Times

NHS Scotland's drug and alcohol treatment waiting time standard — that 90% of patients should be seen within three weeks — was met nationally at 92.7% in the final quarter of 2025, but five health boards fell below the target, with Shetland (80.0%) and Western Isles (81.0%) performing worst [12]. Broader NHS waiting lists, including for elective surgery, have remained a persistent issue across UK nations.

The Independence Question: Stuck

The 2022 UK Supreme Court ruling that Holyrood cannot legislate for an independence referendum without Westminster's consent closed off the SNP's preferred legal route [13]. The ruling was unanimous: even an advisory referendum with "no immediate legal consequences" would relate to reserved constitutional matters under the Scotland Act 1998 [13].

Since then, independence polling has remained largely static. A March 2026 survey found 44% of Scottish adults supporting independence against 56% opposed [14]. Support peaked at 53% in August 2020 but has not sustained a majority in any consistent polling series [14]. A demographic split persists: roughly 59% of 16-to-24-year-olds back independence compared with about a third of those over 65 [14].

Swinney, an "arch gradualist" within the SNP, has ruled out a Catalonia-style unilateral declaration of independence [15]. His stated strategy is to use the pro-independence majority in Holyrood to build a democratic mandate, but without a legal mechanism to act on it, this remains aspirational. Internal pressure from the party's fundamentalist wing has been visible: 43 local SNP branches backed a resolution claiming that a pro-independence majority at Holyrood alone should be sufficient to open negotiations with Westminster, but the party leadership ensured it was not selected for debate at the annual conference [15].

Coalition Arithmetic and Governing Without a Majority

The 2026 result produces a parliament where no bloc commands an easy majority. The SNP's 58 seats require at least seven more votes to pass legislation. The most obvious partner is the Scottish Greens, whose 15 seats would bring the combined total to 73 — eight above the majority threshold [3].

Swinney has signaled willingness to cooperate. At a post-election press conference, he confirmed he would invite every party except Reform to discuss common ground [16]. But a formal coalition remains politically fraught. The SNP dissolved its previous cooperation agreement with the Greens in April 2024, a move that triggered a no-confidence motion and nearly brought down Humza Yousaf's government. The Scottish Daily Express described Swinney's renewed overture as opening "the door to a nightmare Scottish Greens coalition" [16].

Liberal Democrat leader Alex Cole-Hamilton explicitly ruled out voting for Swinney as First Minister or entering any formal arrangement with the SNP [4]. Labour and the Conservatives are similarly unlikely partners.

Budget Pressures

The Scottish Government's block grant, determined by the Barnett formula, grew by approximately 1% in real terms for 2025-26 [17]. The subsequent allocation for 2026-27 increased by £424 million in resource spending (1.03% real growth) and £310 million in capital (4.96% real growth) [17]. Overall, the Barnett formula has provided an additional £2.9 billion per year on average through 2026-27 [17].

These figures leave limited room for new spending commitments. Without a reliable majority, every budget vote becomes a negotiation. There is no precedent for a Scottish Government falling mid-term over a budget vote — in 2009, the minority SNP government under Salmond secured its budget only after a deal with independent MSP Margo MacDonald. But the current parliament's fragmentation, with six parties and a record number of Greens, makes each fiscal event a potential flashpoint.

Swinney's government must decide which spending commitments to prioritize and which to trade for opposition support. The Greens' policy priorities — climate investment, rent controls, social housing — overlap with but do not match the SNP's program. Reform UK's 17 MSPs, meanwhile, represent a bloc whose policy preferences on immigration, taxation, and public spending diverge sharply from the governing party.

What Comes Next

Swinney's re-election is less a mandate than a mathematical default. He leads the largest party by a wide margin — 41 seats clear of the joint runners-up — in a parliament where no alternative government is arithmetically viable [3]. That is a form of strength, but a narrow one.

The questions that will define this parliamentary term are concrete: Can Swinney pass a budget without a formal coalition? Will drug deaths, which spiked again in early 2026, resume their downward trend? Will the education attainment gap meaningfully close under a First Minister whose own record on the file stretches back a decade? And will the independence cause find a legal or political pathway that moves it beyond aspiration?

The SNP has governed Scotland for nearly two decades. It has won five consecutive elections. But each victory has been smaller than the last, and the problems accumulating under devolved governance — in health, education, and drugs policy — belong squarely to the party in power. Swinney's fifth term will test whether continuity is a source of stability or a symptom of stagnation.