Plaid Cymru have won 42 seats in Wales’s Senedd election, putting the Welsh nationalists in position to form a minority government and ending more than 100 years of Labour hegemony. Polls consistently suggested Plaid Cymru and Reform UK were neck and neck in the race to become the biggest party under Wales’s new more proportional voting system. As in last year’s closely watched Caerphilly Senedd byelection, however, the contest was not as close as predicted. Reform has come in second, with 34 seats – up from 1% of the vote share in 2021’s election. Labour, for so long Wales’s political behemoth, has limped into third place with just nine seats in a 96-seat parliament. Victory for Plaid makes a Welsh independence referendum a future possibility, and means all three of the UK’s Celtic nations would be controlled by separatist parties, raising the prospect of significant constitutional disputes with Downing Street.…