Observers from the Scottish National Party watch as votes are counted for the 2026 Holyrood elections, at Dewars Centre in Perth, Scotland, last week. The party maintained a minority in the Scottish Parliament, down by only six seats.Jane Barlow/The Associated Press
Samuel McIlhagga is a freelance journalist covering Britain.
It seems like nothing can sink the Scottish National Party.
The governing pro-independence party has been racked with scandals over the past 10 years, each of which seemed like a real threat to its 19-year hold on power in Scotland’s parliamentary election last week.
In 2018, former first minister Alex Salmond was accused of attempted rape, assault and sexual harassment, charges on which he was acquitted; later, he accused his protégé and then-first minister Nicola Sturgeon of a “conspiracy to remove him from public life.”
In 2021, the Scottish police launched Operation Branchform, an investigation into SNP fraud that indirectly led to Ms. Sturgeon’s resignation two years later, and to embezzlement charges for her then-husband, former SNP chief executive Peter Murrell. Her successor, Humza Yousaf, then botched the SNP’s coalition with the Scottish Greens in April, 2024, leading to his ousting as leader just over 13 months into the job.
Since then, pollsters have made gloomy predictions about the SNP’s chances. Even after Mr. Yousaf was replaced by the placid, boring and so-far scandal-free John Swinney, the party lost 39 of Scotland’s 57 seats in Westminster as Labour swept the 2024 British general election.
Yet these events have stuck to the SNP’s great ship of state like barnacles: They’re not pretty, but they can, apparently, be lived with. Despite the global trend of dissatisfaction with incumbents, it has not slowed down, and when last week’s election was all said and done, the SNP was able to maintain a minority in the Scottish Parliament, winning 58 of 129 seats – a dip of only six seats.
SNP Leader John Swinney waves after winning his seat at a vote-counting centre in Perthshire, Scotland, last week.ANDY BUCHANAN/AFP/Getty Images
Under Mr. Salmond, the SNP won power for the first time – a minority – in 2007, doing so by dethroning the Labour Party, which had been rejected at the polls after several decades of unquestioned hegemony in Scotland. The SNP has held either a majority or plurality in the devolved parliament ever since – a platform from which it can campaign for independence and position Scotland as a progressive alternative to Westminster.
But scandals aren’t the SNP’s only problem. The nationalists have often been accused of focusing too much on constitutional issues like independence. After 19 years and a failed referendum in 2014, they appear no closer to achieving their goal. And while it remains a divisive issue with solid support, a Savanta poll found that only 13 per cent of Scots identified it as a top-three priority.
Worse, many critics say the government’s focus there has come at the expense of the domestic issues that Scots generally care about instead, including education and economic growth. PISA scores, a measure that compares national educational attainment, declined noticeably after 2012, going from high to average compared to OECD benchmarks. The SNP has also been accused of losing control of a spiralling drug-death epidemic, with Scotland recording more than 1,000 drug deaths a year since 2018 – around three-to-four times the British per-capita rate.
The SNP seems to have been saved from its own defeat last week by events both south and north of the border. The most important of these developments is the rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform. Long thought of implicitly, if not explicitly, as an English nationalist party by many in Scotland, Reform made notable Caledonian inroads last week, part of its huge surge in the broader British local elections. The right-populist party went from one seat to 17 in Holyrood, tying them for second place with Labour.
But at the ballot box, many Scottish middle-class liberals who were disappointed with the SNP’s record – particularly in ridings like Glasgow Kelvin and Edinburgh South Western – likely still placed an X next to Mr. Swinney’s party, driven by fear of Mr. Farage’s Reform. It’s little surprise that Mr. Swinney has already leveraged this for his party’s bread-and-butter cause, saying that it is “urgent” to achieve independence so as to “Farage-proof” Scotland from a potential Reform government in London.
The SNP isn’t only looking to their right flank for threats, though. South of the border, Labour was increasingly supplanted by the Green Party as the main centre-left party in dozens of English cities. Until now, the SNP has largely managed to fend off challengers on the left. But at this election, the Scottish Greens won a record 15 seats, including two urban student-heavy seats (Edinburgh Central and Glasgow Southside) from the SNP.
So far, the SNP has been saved by outside forces. But its record in government remains weak despite all that time in power, and its coalition of pro-independence voters seems shaky. It might take just one more scandal to sweep Mr. Swinney out the door – and the SNP with him.