For the first time, pro-independence parties have won a majority in the UK’s devolved parliaments in both Scotland and Wales after bitterly contested elections.
They join Northern Ireland, where Sinn Féin, which has long sought reunification with Ireland, is in power in the Belfast assembly.
The current Scottish parliament, in the Holyrood area of Edinburgh, and the Welsh parliament, known as the Senedd, in Cardiff, were opened in 1999.
It followed the 1997 referendums in both countries, which voted to move towards greater self-government, and led to the UK’s devolution acts the following year.
Along with the Northern Ireland assembly, known as Stormont, they have significant powers over issues such as health, education, transport, and the environment.
The picture is muddied, as in both Wales and Scotland, there is no party with an overall majority.
In Scotland, the Scottish National Party (SNP), founded in 1934, won the biggest share of the 129 parliamentary seats, taking 58.
But it lost six seats and fell short of an overall majority.
Instead, the insurgent anti-immigrant Reform UK took 17 seats, entering the parliament for the first time, while the left-wing Greens also surged to 15 seats, up from six.
Plaid Cymru, which means the Party of Wales and was founded in 1925, won 43 out of 96 seats in the Senedd, taking 20 new seats but also short of an absolute majority.
But it booted Labor out of power, ending the center-left party’s century-old dominance of Welsh politics. Labour ended in a humiliating third place with just nine seats, having lost 35.
Reform UK again upset the picture in Wales, storming into the Senedd for the first time, snatching 34 seats.
SNP leader John Swinney, 61, has long harbored dreams of independence for Scotland, a nation of 5.5 million people.
Before Thursday’s elections, he had floated the idea of calling a new Scottish referendum on the issue in 2028.
In the last such vote in 2014, 55 percent of the country voted against becoming an independent nation. And any new referendum would need approval from the UK parliament and Holyrood.
“I’m absolutely committed to the winning of Scottish independence and to putting those arguments to the people,” Swinney told AFP on Friday.
Plaid Cymru says in its manifesto that “as the National Party of Wales, the Party’s aims shall be: to secure independence for Wales in Europe.”
But it lists other issues among its priorities, in a country where 20 percent of the population live in poverty.
The party says it will establish a national commission to organise an “ongoing national conversation about the options for Wales’s constitutional future” among its 3.3 million people.
“I don’t think the UK is going to fall apart any time soon,” political analyst at Queen Mary University in London, Tim Bale, told AFP.
But he predicted greater tensions between the UK government in London, the devolved nations and the province of Northern Ireland.
The results raise “deep questions about the stability of the UK … because you have four constituent nations in this country,” said political analyst Robert Ford at Manchester University.
“England is demographically, economically, culturally, politically dominant. That has always been an uneven settlement.”
Both SNP and Plaid Cymru are on the left of the political spectrum, and will have to find partners with whom they can govern.
Plaid Cymru leader Rhun ap Iorwerth, 53, has said he will “reach out” to other politicians to form a new Welsh government.
“Even if we don’t see any immediate consequences, the truth is that the levers of power will be held by parties that want to change the existing constitutional settlement,” added Ford.
Northern Ireland’s First Minister, and deputy Sinn Féin leader, Michelle O’Neill, said the people of Scotland and Wales had shown they were “tired of the shackles of Westminster”.
She vowed to work to “find common ground with anybody” interested in national self-determination.
By Agence France-Presse
