Later on Tuesday, Swinney will stand as first minister in a poll of MSPs.<\/p>\n
All six parties in the Scottish Parliament have nominated their leaders to serve in the post, but Swinney’s success is virtually assured after the SNP’s emphatic victory in the 7 May election.<\/p>\n
The SNP won 58 seats, with its nearest rivals, Labour and Reform UK, on 17 each.<\/p>\n
That means the opposition parties would need to agree on an alternative candidate to defeat Swinney, a highly unlikely prospect.<\/p>\n
If he is elected by MSPs \u2013 or strictly speaking selected as their nominee for first minister \u2013 Swinney’s appointment will be confirmed by royal warrant before he is sworn in at the Court of Session in Edinburgh on Wednesday.<\/p>\n
The new first minister is then expected to begin the process of appointing his cabinet.<\/p>\n
In the election, the SNP fell seven seats short of a majority at Holyrood where the electoral system means minority or coalition government is the norm.<\/p>\n
This means he will need support from other parties to pass legislation.<\/p>\n
Swinney has said he is happy to deal with all opposition parties except Reform UK, led in Scotland by former Conservative peer Malcolm Offord.<\/p>\n
He said Nigel Farage’s party had “completely different values” to his, a position Lord Offord called “arrogant, petty and deeply undemocratic.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Later on Tuesday, Swinney will stand as first minister in a poll of MSPs. All six parties in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":592378,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[59,57,58,50,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-592377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=592377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/592377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/592378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=592377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=592377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=592377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}