Nationalist Governments Win Scotland and Wales, but Stay Boxed In

For the first time since devolution began in 1999, nationalist parties govern on both sides of Great Britain’s internal border. The Scottish National Party (SNP, Scotland’s pro-independence governing party) won 58 of 129 seats at Holyrood on 7 May 2026, while in Cardiff, Plaid Cymru took 43 of the Senedd’s 96 seats. Both fell short of a majority. Both formed minority governments anyway. And both leaders spent the days after the count talking about powers and money rather than secession.

That last detail matters more than the maps of saltires and dragons suggest. Two nationalist wins read like momentum toward two breakaway states. The constitutional plumbing says otherwise, and the parties that just won know it better than anyone.

Two Nationalist Wins, Two Very Different Stories

The Scottish result was continuity dressed as drama. John Swinney, the SNP leader re-elected as First Minister, delivered his party’s fifth straight Holyrood victory. The opposition stayed scattered: Scottish Labour and Reform UK Scotland tied on 17 seats each, the pro-independence Scottish Greens hit a record 15, the Scottish Conservatives slid to 12, and the Scottish Liberal Democrats held 10.

Wales was the rupture. Plaid Cymru, the “Party of Wales,” climbed from a projected baseline to 43 seats in an enlarged 96-member chamber, with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK surging into second on 34. Welsh Labour cratered to nine. You can see the official figures in the Holyrood 2026 election results and the enlarged Senedd’s new 96-seat voting arrangements.

The Seat Count Side by Side

Same Headline, Different Weight

One number captures the gap. Plaid won 45 percent of Welsh seats off a transformed vote; the SNP won 45 percent of Scottish seats by losing ground and holding on. The Welsh result rearranged the board. The Scottish one mostly kept it where it was.

Wales Just Ended a Century of Labour Rule

Labour had topped every Welsh contest since the 1922 United Kingdom general election. That streak is over. For the first time since the Senedd was created, Labour did not win the most seats in Wales, and it lost control of the regional government it had run without interruption for 27 years.

The symbolism turned personal. Eluned Morgan, Welsh Labour leader and outgoing First Minister, lost her own seat. By the reckoning of election historians, she became the first sitting head of a government anywhere in the UK to be voted out of their own constituency. A party leader does not usually get to concede defeat and exit the chamber on the same night.

• Nine seats: Welsh Labour’s lowest total since devolution, down from a commanding bloc the term before.
• One in six: the share of Senedd seats now held by Labour and the Conservatives combined, parties that once split a clear majority.
• Two: Green members of the Senedd, the party’s first ever, and the votes that put Plaid over the line.

Welsh Labour’s slide was not a single bad night. The term it just finished saw three first ministers, with Mark Drakeford’s planned departure giving way to a short, scandal-hit Vaughan Gething tenure before Morgan took over in August 2024. The deep unpopularity of Keir Starmer, the UK Labour Prime Minister, hung over all of it.

Reform UK and the Brexit Fault Line That Won’t Close

Reform UK was the other engine of the night, and it ran harder in Wales than in Scotland. That split is not random. Wales voted Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum; Scotland voted Remain by a wide margin, and the older UK Independence Party once won Senedd seats while never breaking through at Holyrood. A decade on, the same fault line still shapes where the populist right finds oxygen.

The surge triggered its own backlash. Anti-Reform voters consolidated, and the beneficiaries were the nationalists. In Scotland, that meant sticking with the SNP despite a term of scandal and patchy delivery; the party’s vote fell even as its seat count held. In Wales, Plaid Cymru ran explicitly as the only force that could stop Reform, the same pitch it used to win the pivotal Caerphilly by-election a year earlier.

A Reform government in Cardiff was never the likely outcome. The party drew strong opposition from almost every other bloc in the chamber. But its second-place finish, and Labour’s collapse beneath it, is the clearest sign yet that the wider Reform breakthrough across Britain in 2026 is reshaping devolved politics, not just Westminster.

Why Independence Is No Closer Than Before

Here is the part the celebratory coverage skips. Two nationalist governments do not add up to two referendums, or even one. The route to a legal independence vote runs through London, and London is not opening the door.

Scotland’s Locked Ballot

The SNP wants a second independence referendum. It cannot legislate for one. The UK Supreme Court settled the question in 2022, ruling that Holyrood lacks the power to call a referendum on its own. The 2014 vote, which ended 55.3 percent for No against 44.7 percent for Yes, happened only because Prime Minister David Cameron agreed to transfer the power through the 2012 Edinburgh Agreement. No prime minister since has been willing to repeat the favour.

Polling tells the same cautious story. Roughly half of Scots say they would back independence if asked, but the SNP’s internal benchmark has held for a decade.

The party has wanted a stable 60 percent in the polls before risking another campaign, and that number has not arrived.

Wales Is Not Even Asking

Plaid Cymru went further in the other direction. Unlike its 2021 campaign, it did not run on an independence referendum at all. Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid leader sworn in as Wales’s first nationalist First Minister, framed the goal as laying groundwork for a future white paper on independence, which is several constitutional steps short of a ballot paper. The immediate asks are practical:

• Devolution of rail powers, an area Scotland already partly controls.
• Devolution of justice and policing, long handled at Westminster for Wales.
• Control of the Crown Estate’s Welsh assets, a power Scotland secured years ago.

In short, Wales is asking to catch up to Scotland’s existing toolkit, not to leave the UK. The mandate both governments actually hold is for more devolution and more funding, with the existential question parked.

How the Voting Math Produced Lopsided Results

Both nations use electoral systems with a proportional element, but they diverged this cycle. Scotland kept the additional member system (AMS, single-member seats won by plurality plus regional list seats topped up for proportionality). Wales scrapped its version and switched to a fully proportional closed-list model: 16 districts, each electing six members.

Neither delivered clean proportionality. In Scotland, the outcome was the most disproportionate in Holyrood’s history. The SNP’s constituency vote fell 9.5 points, from 47.7 percent in 2021 to 38.2 percent, yet it held nearly all its constituency seats because Reform fractured the unionist vote and the Greens, standing in just six constituencies, funnelled pro-independence support to the SNP. The two pro-independence parties took a combined record 73 seats on only 40.5 percent of the constituency vote, a long way from a majority of voters.

Wales tripped on its own new design. A district magnitude of six, combined with the d’Hondt seat-allocation method, meant the system rewarded only parties clearing roughly 10 percent of the constituency vote. Labour had expected to clear that bar comfortably. Instead it won a seat in only just over half the districts, and the threshold it lobbied for worked against it. Voters and broadcasters treated the whole thing as a straight Plaid-versus-Reform fight, a sign the new rules were not widely understood.

The Alberta Echo, and the Referendum Britain Still Controls

The investitures closed the loop quickly. In Wales, the vote of investiture fell on 12 May, and ap Iorwerth won on the first round with the Greens behind him and Welsh Labour and the Liberal Democrats abstaining. In Scotland, the 19 May vote saw every party leader nominated, and Swinney was returned only after three rounds. Two minority governments are now governing without majorities in Cardiff and Edinburgh, leaning on abstentions and case-by-case deals.

For anyone watching from Canada, the parallels with Quebec and now Alberta are hard to miss. On 19 October 2026, Albertans will vote in a province-wide referendum on nine questions covering immigration and constitutional reform, plus a tenth on whether the province should begin a legal process toward separation. The sharp contrast is the oversight: Alberta’s government wrote its own separation question, while the UK requires its consent before a region can even put the question. As the wider devolution debate is laid out in explainers on how the Senedd’s powers work, the gap between asking and achieving stays wide.

The lesson from the UK, Quebec, and Alberta runs in one direction. A separatist question is far easier to put on a ballot than to settle, and far harder still when a national government can simply decline to hold the vote. Scotland and Wales both have nationalist governments now. Whether either gets the referendum its base wants depends on a decision that neither Edinburgh nor Cardiff is allowed to make.