12AUG

Plaid takes Cardiff after 27 years

3 min read

14:07UTC

Rhun ap Iorwerth was elected First Minister of Wales on Tuesday 12 May, the first head of the Welsh Government from outside Labour since devolution in 1999. Two Welsh Green votes carried him through.

← Back to Reform bleeds councillors, wins by-elections Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsDeveloping

Key takeaway

Wales has its first non-Labour First Minister since 1999; the majority lasts as long as the Greens keep voting yes.

Rhun ap Iorwerth, the Plaid Cymru leader, was elected First Minister of Wales on Tuesday 12 May 2026 and sworn in by Mrs Justice Mary Stacey DBE. ¹ "It is the greatest privilege of my life," he told the Senedd, "to be elected First Minister in a nation that means so much to me." He is the first head of the Welsh Government from outside the Labour Party in the 27 years since devolution in 1999, and the first to represent a North Wales constituency (Bangor Conwy Môn).

Plaid won 43 of 96 seats on 7 May 2026 , six short of the 49 needed for a majority under the new closed-list PR (proportional representation) system. Wales Green Party MSs Anthony Slaughter (Cardiff and Penarth) and Paul Rock (Cardiff Ffynnon Taf) provided the 44-vote bloc that carried Tuesday's First Minister vote. The Green pair are the only votes between Plaid's 43 and the 44-vote majority threshold.

The Greens published four conditions on Saturday 9 May 2026 (cost-of-living, NHS, the rental crisis, the natural environment) as the price of their support, including specific demands for rent freezes, an end to no-fault evictions, free bus travel for under-22s, and public control of water. Slaughter said the same day "no decisions have been made at this point." ² Three days later, The Greens voted ap Iorwerth in anyway. The all-Plaid cabinet announced Wednesday 13 May 2026 contains no Green ministers; The Greens carry the votes and the conditions but hold none of the offices.

Wales operates without a written constitution: the four conditions are political collateral, not contractual obligation. Confidence-and-supply terms have legal weight only where they appear in standing orders, and none of those four do today. The arrangement runs on rolling assurance, vote by vote, on whichever bill The Greens have most leverage over next. Wales Green Party signing a written deal, or refusing to, becomes the new monthly test of whether ap Iorwerth's government has a working majority.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

The Welsh Parliament has been controlled by Labour since it was set up in 1999. That changed on Tuesday 12 May when Rhun ap Iorwerth of Plaid Cymru, the Welsh nationalist party, was elected First Minister. Plaid won 43 of the 96 seats in the new, larger Welsh Parliament. That is not a majority on its own. To be elected, ap Iorwerth needed the support of the two Welsh Green MSs, who provided the votes without signing any formal agreement. This matters because every time the new government wants to pass a law or a budget, it will need at least one of those two Green votes again. The Greens have published four demands covering rent, the NHS, free buses for under-22s, and the environment, but nothing is signed. The government works for as long as the Greens keep voting yes.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

Welsh Labour's vote share in 2026 collapsed under the new closed-list proportional system, which Morgan's own government introduced.

Under closed-list PR with no formal threshold, seats are allocated by D'Hondt across regional lists, and any party falling below the implied threshold per region receives nothing from that region. Welsh Labour won 9 of 96 seats, down from 30 of 60 in 2021. Welsh Labour's geographic concentration in south Wales valleys seats became a liability rather than an asset under a system that rewards broad vote distribution across all 16 constituencies.

What could happen next?

Risk
Without a written agreement, any Senedd bill touching the Greens' four published conditions (rent freeze, NHS, bus travel, water) could trigger a confidence test; a single Green abstention would defeat most contested legislation.
Consequence
Welsh Labour's absence from government for the first time since 1999 redirects its funding, personnel, and institutional attention to a leadership contest, removing the official-opposition capacity needed to hold ap Iorwerth's government to account.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Primary parallel: Alex Salmond's SNP governed Scotland from 2007 to 2011 as a minority of 47 in a 129-seat chamber, without a formal coalition. He survived by negotiating bill-by-bill with opposition parties, including a budget passed only after last-minute Lib Dem concessions. The structural parallel to Wales 2026 is exact: a plurality party relying on informal support from a smaller partner with published policy demands but no written commitment.

Counter-parallel: In 2000 the first Welsh First Minister Alun Michael resigned after losing a confidence vote, because his own party (Labour) could not hold its Lib Dem confidence-and-supply partners on a budget amendment.

The Welsh system has a precedent for minority government collapsing specifically when confidence-and-supply arrangements are untested. ap Iorwerth is the second non-Labour FM in Welsh history after Rhodri Morgan's brief coalition experiment; the first non-Labour FM from a nationalist party.

Consensus view: The Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University has consistently noted that minority government under the Senedd's new 96-seat closed-list system is structurally more fragile than at Westminster, because the chamber has no convention of government survival between confidence votes. Each contested bill requires individual negotiation with confidence-and-supply partners.

Counter-view: Alan Convery at Edinburgh University, writing about the Scottish Parliament's minority experience under Alex Salmond from 2007 to 2011, has argued that minority governments in devolved chambers often survive longer than expected because opposition parties face the same electoral risk from being seen to collapse the government. The Greens' 2026 seat count (two seats) means they have no safe voting record to run on if Plaid falls and a fresh election is called.

Key tension: Whether the absence of a written agreement gives ap Iorwerth flexibility to govern without Green demands, or gives The Greens leverage to extract concessions on every individual bill without contractual obligation.

First Reported In

Update #8 · Mutiny in week one

Welsh Government· 14 May 2026

Read original →

Causes and effects

Caused by

Welsh Labour collapses to nine seats

Welsh Labour's collapse to 9 seats directly enabled Plaid to form a minority government and elect ap Iorwerth First Minister.

Occurred 7 May 2026

Read story →

Plaid Cymru forms Welsh minority government

Plaid's minority government formation required Green confidence-and-supply, setting the terms for the all-Plaid cabinet without Green ministerial posts.

Occurred 8 May 2026

Read story →

This Event

Plaid takes Cardiff after 27 years

Plaid governs as a minority on confidence-and-supply with no written agreement; the Greens published four conditions and then voted ap Iorwerth in three days later without ministerial seats or a signed deal.

Led to

ap Iorwerth's six-power Wales Bill ask

ap Iorwerth's election as First Minister on 12 May enabled his priorities statement and youth justice demand on 19 May.

Occurred 19 May 2026

Read story →

Different Perspectives

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.

Scottish Labour

Michael Marra, Joe Fagan and Monica Lennon declared for the Scottish Labour leadership, but each needs nine endorsements from MSPs, MPs and unions before members vote, with nominations closing 17 August. Lennon, the only woman standing, says the threshold favours a male-run process and could produce an all-male ballot.

Plaid Cymru

Plaid Cymru held both Welsh wards Reform challenged in the same set of by-elections, Bro'r Llynnoedd on Anglesey by 48.5% to 39.3% and Hengoed on Caerphilly by 49.9% to 36.4%. The party that leads the Welsh government kept Reform in second in both.

Conservative Party

The Conservatives lost three of ten council by-elections fought on 30 July and 6 August, two wards to Reform in Norfolk and one to the Greens in Surrey, continuing a run of losses since the May sweep. Every seat gone had been Conservative-held going into the contest.

Reform UK

Reform's 56 lost councillors since May came from defection, suspension and resignation, not lost votes, while the party gained three of ten council by-elections and finished second in four more over the same fortnight. That record undercuts reading the churn as electoral retreat.

Democratic Unionist Party

Gavin Robinson rejects Sinn Féin's characterisation of the institutions as precarious, says the DUP is "committed to" delivering for the public, and will not be "goaded" into a dispute he attributes to Treasury funding rather than unionist bad faith.