Scottish National Party
centre-left nationalist political party in Scotland
The Scottish National Party (SNP; Scottish Gaelic: Pàrtaidh Nàiseanta na h-Alba [ˈpʰaːrˠtʰi ˈn̪ˠaːʃən̪ˠt̪ə nə ˈhal̪ˠapə] Scots: Scots Naitional Pairty) is a Scottish nationalist and social democratic political party in Scotland. It holds 57 of the 129 seats in the Scottish Parliament and 8 out of the 57 Scottish seats in the House of Commons. It is represented by 413 of the 1,226 local councillors across Scotland. The SNP supports and campaigns for Scottish independence from the United Kingdom and for an independent Scotland's membership in the European Union, with a platform based on centre-left progressive social policies and civic nationalism.
Founded in 1934 with the amalgamation of the National Party of Scotland and the Scottish Party, it has had continuous parliamentary representation in Westminster since Winnie Ewing won the 1967 Hamilton by-election. At the February 1974 general election it scored 22% of the vote and 30% in the October general election of the same year; it received 7 seats in the former and 11 in the latter of 72 Scottish seats up for election. With the establishment of the devolved Scottish Parliament in 1999, the SNP became the second-largest party, serving two terms as the opposition to a Labour–Liberal Democrat coalition.
The SNP entered government under Alex Salmond at the 2007 Scottish Parliament election with 45% of the vote, forming a minority government, before going on to win the 2011 Parliament election, after which it formed Holyrood's first majority government. After Scotland voted against independence in the 2014 referendum, Salmond resigned and was succeeded by Nicola Sturgeon. In the run up to the 2015 election, the SNP tripled its membership to 110,000.
The public source identifies “Scottish National Party” as centre-left nationalist political party in Scotland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Scottish, National and Party.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 24, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10658. VIAF identifies the subject as 140362016. The Library of Congress control number is n50047023. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1934, 1967, 1974 and 1999.
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This entry incorporates text from “Scottish National Party” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.