Nicola Sturgeon would undoubtedly have loved to secure a majority, but she is well aware that minority government is not the minefield many think it is.
When Alex Salmond’s SNP edged ahead of Labour to win the 2007 election by a nose, he tried to forge a coalition with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. When those parties backed out, Mr Salmond knew he had no option but to go for a minority government.
It was uncharted territory for the nascent Scottish parliament. No one knew how it would work or, indeed, how long it would last.
Mr Salmond used minority government to his advantage. Indeed, it almost seemed to suit a politician like him, someone who was prepared to do deals with anybody to stay in power. His SNP government started making executive decisions whenever it could, bypassing parliament where possible. Mr Salmond changed the name of the Scottish executive to the Scottish government and moved to scrap the tolls on the Forth road bridge, wrong-footing his opponents who thought he would get bogged down in negotiations at every turn.
Mr Salmond, always the pragmatist, dropped policies that would prove difficult to get through Holyrood. First to go was the policy of scrapping council tax and replacing it with a local income tax. Then, over the course of the parliament, his commitment to holding a referendum on independence, which had forced the Lib Dems to refuse a coalition, was also dropped.
Advertisement
Then there were the backroom deals. During the first eight years of devolution, budget days were boring affairs, cooked up well in advance by the coalition partners in charge of the executive. But that four-year period of minority government suddenly became characterised by brinkmanship and last-minute haggling as each opposition party tried to squeeze more and more out of John Swinney, the finance secretary, in return for its support.
At the same time, Mr Swinney always tried to play each party off against the other and no one actually knew how the vote was going to go before it actually happened.
The Conservatives, with Annabel Goldie at the helm, had long argued for minority government, and the Tories took full advantage, winning tax breaks for businesses and more police officers from the SNP in return for their support. Even the two Greens and Margo Macdonald, the independent MSP, got in on the act, with the Greens securing funding for green community projects and Ms Macdonald winning annual financial boosts for her beloved Edinburgh almost every year.
There is no doubt that minority government suited Mr Salmond. Ms Sturgeon, as a more principled politician, may not find it so easy to drop policies on one hand and agree with her opponents on another, just to get a deal.
But she is in a much stronger position than he was: she has 63 MSPs to his 47. And also, she has been there before, as Mr Salmond’s deputy during that time of minority rule.
Advertisement
So she has nothing to fear and, like her predecessor, she might find that she actually enjoys it. Sit back and enjoy the spectacle.