The result has settled into something close to its final shape, and the Holyrood arithmetic of May 2026 produces a Parliament that does not break decisively for any side. SNP and Labour are within a handful of seats of each other; the Greens have held a smaller but pivotal bloc; the Liberal Democrats sit just above their 2021 floor; the Conservatives are reduced, though not erased.
What this means in practice is that a single party can pass a budget alone only by a coincidence of votes that nobody at the moment has confidence to predict. Coalition is back as the dominant frame, and the three live conversations in Edinburgh this week are about which combinations could realistically govern, which could realistically pass a budget without governing, and which would split their respective parties before they even arrived at a programme.
The first scenario, which the SNP front bench is still treating as the working assumption, is a revival of the cooperation agreement with the Greens. The terms would be tighter than the Bute House Agreement of 2021–24, with explicit veto points written in for the Greens on environmental policy and an agreed glide path on rent controls. The risk for the SNP is that the Greens, this time, do not need them as much as they did last time round.
The second is a Labour-led arrangement, which would require a tacit understanding with the Liberal Democrats and the abstention of either the Greens or the SNP on confidence votes. Labour figures at Westminster have spent the week briefing that this is the option they prefer; Labour figures in Edinburgh have spent the week briefing that this is the option they fear, because it would require them to keep both the Greens and the LibDems happy on infrastructure spending without offending UK Treasury orthodoxy.
The third — a grand-coalition variant in which SNP and Labour govern together on a strictly time-limited budget — has been raised privately by a handful of senior MSPs on both sides. The argument is that the demographic and fiscal challenges facing Scotland in the late 2020s are large enough to merit a one-Parliament truce on the constitutional question. The argument against is that it would split both parties, and that neither leadership has anything to gain from being the first to suggest it publicly.
What is striking, talking to MSPs newly returned and to officials in Victoria Quay, is how quickly the rhetoric of the campaign has been laid aside. There is a recognition that the next 12 months will not be about the constitution; they will be about the budget, the NHS workforce pipeline, and the energy transition timetable. The constitution will come back, as it always does. But the early signals from this Parliament are that, for the first time in years, the business of governing has space to breathe.
Whoever forms the next administration will inherit a fiscal framework that is significantly less generous than the one Holyrood operated under between 2017 and 2023. Block-grant adjustments and devolved tax behaviour have moved against the Scottish Government in net terms. The Scottish Fiscal Commission's medium-term outlook, published in March, made plain that without either revenue increases or genuine reform of public-service productivity, the budget gap by 2028 will be in the £1.5–2.5bn range. Coalition partners will need to decide quickly whose policy preferences absorb that adjustment.
One senior official, asked which combination she thought most likely to actually pass a budget on time, paused for some seconds before answering. 'Any of them,' she said, 'if the leaderships decide they want to.' That is, in its way, the most optimistic note out of Edinburgh this fortnight.
Catriona MacLeod is Politics Editor at The Scottish Review. She has covered Holyrood for fourteen years.