Scotland’s Election Results 2026 – Why Independence Never Dies

The SNP has governed Scotland for eighteen years. It has been rocked by scandal, lost Westminster seats, and changed leader three times in two years. On 7 May it won its fifth successive Holyrood election — without a majority, but as the dominant force in a parliament where independence supporters now command 73 seats. Here is why the constitutional question is structural, not contingent — and what the results tell us about where it goes next.

The results

The SNP elected 58 MSPs, seven short of an outright majority of 65, but comfortably the largest party in a 129-seat chamber. Labour and Reform UK tied for second place on 17 seats each, a result that was striking for both parties: Reform’s entry to Scottish Parliament in significant numbers for the first time, and Labour’s failure to capitalise on the SNP’s period of internal turbulence.

The Scottish Greens won 15 seats and elected their first ever constituency MSPs, including Lorna Slater, who took Edinburgh Central from the SNP’s Angus Robertson in one of the most significant upsets of the night. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats returned much reduced presences.

The crucial figure is not the SNP’s 58, it is the pro-independence total. The SNP’s 58 plus the Greens’ 15 gives a combined independence majority of 73 seats in the 129-seat parliament. That is a majority of 17 for independence-supporting parties, achieved without the SNP needing a majority of their own.

Turnout fell sharply to 53.2 per cent, down from 63.5 per cent in 2021. That decline matters for the constitutional question, lower turnout in Holyrood elections historically correlates with a more pro-independence composition of those who do turn out.

What John Swinney does next

John Swinney is the only MSP to have served continuously since the Scottish Parliament’s first session in 1999. He now leads a minority government in a parliament where his party cannot command a majority alone, but where a pro-independence majority exists and can be assembled on constitutional questions.

Swinney has been explicit throughout the campaign: the result would be treated as a mandate for a second independence referendum. The legal mechanism does not yet exist, the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling confirmed that Holyrood cannot legislate for a referendum without a Section 30 order from Westminster, which the current UK government has declined to grant. But a parliament with 73 pro-independence MSPs changes the political temperature around that question dramatically.

The SNP’s immediate legislative challenge is governing as a minority. On day-to-day devolved policy including health, education, and housing, Swinney needs to assemble majorities vote by vote, as Salmond did between 2007 and 2011. On the constitutional question, the pro-independence majority makes that arithmetic more straightforward.

Reform’s breakthrough

Reform UK’s 17 Holyrood seats, all won from the regional list, as projected, represent a historic first. The party has never before held seats in a devolved parliament. Their presence on the Net Zero, Energy and Transport Committee, and other scrutiny committees where membership is allocated proportionally, changes the character of that scrutiny.

The party’s 17 seats also placed them level with Labour as the second largest party, a result that embarrassed Scottish Labour and intensified questions about Anas Sarwar’s leadership, coming the week after the party’s catastrophic English council losses.

The structural case

The most striking fact about the 2026 Holyrood result is not the SNP’s failure to win a majority. It is that independence polling reached 55 per cent Yes in the final pre-election surveys despite eighteen years of SNP government, scandal, and the 2014 referendum defeat, and the Holyrood result, with its 73-seat pro-independence majority, reflects that polling rather than contradicting it.

Independence support at approximately 50-55 per cent has three overlapping structural sources that pre-date and survive any individual party’s fortunes.

The first is generational. Younger Scots support independence at significantly higher rates than older Scots, roughly 60-65 per cent of under-35s compared to approximately 35-40 per cent of over-65s. As the electorate turns over, the arithmetic of a future referendum improves. This is a slow-moving force but a reliable one.

The second is the grievance architecture of the constitutional settlement. Scotland voted 62 per cent to Remain in the Brexit referendum and received the same outcome as England. The experience of being governed by Conservative governments it did not vote for, the Tories have not won a majority of Scottish seats since 1955, is embedded in Scottish political consciousness in a way that produces persistent constitutional dissatisfaction regardless of who is in Holyrood.

The third is civic identity. Scotland has a distinct legal system, educational system, media landscape, and public institutions. The NHS in Scotland operates differently from NHS England in meaningful ways. The sense of Scotland as a distinct political community provides a continuous supply of cultural and political justification for asking the question: why are we not independent?

These three forces are not products of SNP competence in government. They are structural features of Scottish political life that would persist even if the SNP ceased to exist as a political force tomorrow. The party is the vehicle for the constitutional question, not its cause.

What Westminster does now

The UK government faces a specific problem. A parliament with a 73-seat pro-independence majority, backed by 55 per cent of Scots in polling, is a more difficult constitutional reality to manage than a 64-seat SNP plurality without a majority, which was the 2021 situation.

Refusing a Section 30 order remains legally defensible, the Supreme Court has confirmed as much. But the political cost of indefinite refusal grows with each election that returns a pro-independence majority. The question of whether the democratic preferences of 73 MSPs, and 55 per cent of Scottish voters, can be permanently blocked by Westminster without consequence for the union’s legitimacy is one that deepens with each passing year.

Scotland’s constitutional question will not be resolved this parliament. The structural forces sustaining independence support at 50-55 per cent are long-term. The 7 May results confirmed that those forces are not weakening. The only resolution is either a referendum that settles the question for a generation or a reformed union that answers the underlying question about self-determination differently enough to shift the polling baseline.

Neither is currently on offer. Both are becoming more politically necessary.