According to Nicola Sturgeon, the SNP has a mandate not only to form the next Scottish Government but to implement the manifesto on which it fought and won the election. The first part of this statement is clearly true, and none of Scotland's parties have either the capacity or the desire to prevent the SNP from continuing in power.
The second part of the statement, that the SNP has a mandate to implement its manifesto, strikes me as rather beside the point. There is only one way of implementing a manifesto as a minority government, and that is by engaging in horse-trading in order to garner sufficient votes (or abstentions) from other parties to pass your policies into law.
Sturgeon's words were interpreted in at least one newspaper as a threat to Labour and the LibDems that the voters would hold them to account if they stood in the way of SNP policies. But threatening Labour and the LibDems with punishment from the voters is rather like threatening to stand on somebody's toes after you have cut off their legs. The threat is not so much hollow as meaningless, particularly given the perception that Labour's latest drubbing at the polls was at least in part a result of its being perceived as too soft on the constitutional issues. Both parties are likely to conclude that they have little to gain from being midwife to the SNP's third term.
The Conservatives fought a successful campaign based almost entirely on the notion that they would confront the SNP at every turn. It's hard to see how they can now be expected to cooperate with an SNP administration they have been elected to oppose. (And hard to see how the SNP could stomach such support, given the frequency with which they hurl the word "Tory" into every debate and at every opponent.)
This, we are told, is because Scotland has fractured along a constitutional faultline, something that in more hysterical moments is described as "Ulsterisation". There is no denying this, but it's also worth asking how we got here. After their (fairly narrow) defeat in the Independence referendum, the SNP were faced with a choice. They could keep the pressure up, denounce the post-referendum settlement as a betrayal, and keep open the possibility of a second referendum. Or they could decide that the referendum had settled the issue for the time being (I hesitate to use the word "generation"), be an active player in designing the post-referendum settlement, and find common ground with other parties on specific issues.
Not surprisingly, they chose the first path. It was the one that offered the best hopes of achieving independence in the foreseeable future, enabled them to keep a broad coalition of supporters happy, and bolstered their electoral strength. If I was a SNP strategist, I would have made the same choice. But everything has its price, and the price of this strategy was to foreclose any possibility of partnership with the "Unionist" parties. There's no point complaining that potential partners are refusing to cross the river when you are the one who has burnt all the bridges.
As a result, the SNP finds itself in an awkward position. The Conservatives will only support them on major issues if the SNP swears off any attempt to hold IndyRef2 in the course of this parliament. Labour and the LibDems will only support them if they can portray such support as a humiliating climbdown in which SNP has been forced to adopt their policies.
So their most likely partners are the Greens. This could make for a very peculiar form of minority government, one in which the government party has little room for manoeuvre and in which the junior partner can take credit for any successes (land reform, progressive taxation, scrapping of the SNP's plans for cuts in air passenger duty) but won't necessarily be burdened with the blame for its failures. In the worst-case scenario, the government could find itself forced to pass legislation that Green supporters like but which damages the SNP's own electoral base. At the very least, we are in for an interesting five years, and Sturgeon's talk of mandates and manifestos won't allow her to escape the reality of having to choose between the various forms humiliation on offer from the "Unionists" or accepting whatever clapped out nag Patrick Harvie decides to sell her.
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