As we are told by the Scottish Government, Scotland is facing its most significant fiscal challenge since the Scottish Parliament was convened in 1999.

The Government is looking to cut hundreds of millions of pounds in public spending to balance its budget, and the raft of measures the Finance Secretary, Shona Robison, has announced have gone down like a cup of cold sick. It's not just opposition MSPs who oppose cuts to free school meals for P6 and P7 pupils, for example, but a third sector that has historically had little but positive things to say about the Scottish Government under the SNP. But the Parliament will decide, and we got an early indication on Wednesday of whether the Government will struggle to pass a Budget Bill before the new fiscal year begins in April 2025. The signs are not good.

MSPs voted on two opposition motions, one calling on the Scottish Government to reverse its decision to reintroduce peak train fares and the other calling on the Government to provide free school meals to all primary school children. The Government lost both votes, with the opposition parties arrayed in favour of them.

The Scottish Conservatives, Scottish Labour, the Scottish Liberal Democrats, the Scottish Greens, and Ash Regan, Alba's lone MSP, are united in their opposition to the raft of measures the Scottish Government has announced to relieve the budgetary pressure it faces. They have set the scene for an almighty clash over the Scottish Government budget, which must pass Parliament when the Budget Bill is published in December.

The Scottish Government needs 65 votes to pass a Budget Bill and falls one short even with the support of Ms Regan and the SNP's (currently suspended) John Mason. That means that they need the support of at least one unionist party, or the Scottish Greens, to continue to govern.

The Greens have their own reasons for not supporting the Government. As they have pointed out, the measures proposed by the Scottish Government scrap or water down a raft of Green policies from the heady days of the Bute House Agreement. Having been dependent on Green votes for many years now, Humza Yousaf's tragi-comical immolation of the Scottish Government's cooperation agreement with the Greens means that particular avenue to a majority is largely closed.

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And none of the unionist parties wants to be seen to be propping up an unpopular, pro-independence SNP Government - certainly not without substantial concessions that would mean difficult decisions elsewhere. The Liberal Democrats would be the most likely port of call for Ms Robison, but they could demand too high a ransom.

If the Scottish Government cannot pass a Budget Bill, a vote of no confidence in the Government becomes significantly more likely. If lost, John Swinney would have to resign as First Minister. Parliament would then have 28 days to nominate a new First Minister, after which we would be in extraordinary general election territory.

In other words, failure to pass a Budget Bill is a recipe for gridlock, political chaos, and possibly a spring election. This would not be an early election, as according to the rules governing Scottish Parliament elections, the 2026 elections would still need to be held. So, we would be looking at two elections in the space of just over a year.

And an extraordinary election would not resolve the chaos. Based on an average of the polls, Ballot Box Scotland's current projection suggests that the SNP would win 46 seats, Labour would win 42, the Conservatives 20, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens 10 seats each, and Reform UK would win one seat. Apart from the SNP and Labour, no route to nominating a new First Minister would exist without some degree of cooperation between at least three parties - including the Conservatives, which neither the SNP nor Labour would want to depend on to govern.

None of this would be in the national interest. An extraordinary election would be an extraordinary failure on the part of the Scottish Parliament, leaving the Scottish Government rudderless at a critical moment.

And it would signal the ultimate failure of the Parliament to live up to the promise of a "new politics". Envisioned by the Scottish Constitutional Convention and the architects of the Scotland Act as a body that would govern cooperatively and deliberatively, the Parliament is imbued with the institutional and electoral rules of a European-style, consensual democracy.

However, since being convened in 1999, those rules and structures have been dominated by a Westminster-style political culture: the very culture the Scottish Parliament was once cast in contrast to. An extraordinary election would confirm, in the worst ways, the reality that the Scottish Parliament has failed to "usher in a way of politics that is radically different from the rituals of Westminster", as the Scottish Constitutional Convention put it. Just as adversarial, just as divisive.

This moment has, of course, been coming for a long time. From the beginning, it was clear that the aspirations for the Scottish Parliament would be up against the ferocity of Scottish electoral politics and the animosity it engenders. As former Scottish Liberal Democrats leader Tavish Scott put it in 2011, the "visceral hatred between the Nationalists and Labour […] just transferred from London to Edinburgh".

Can stalemate at Holyrood be avoided?Can stalemate at Holyrood be avoided? (Image: Getty)

Even if we get to next May without an election, this episode will lay bare the weaknesses in our political institutions created by the mismatch between a Parliament designed to govern by consensus and a profoundly adversarial and polarising political culture.

It may be expecting too much of our MSPs to set aside their perceived political interests in the name of the national interest, but that is exactly what is now required of them. We are on the verge of a return to a fragmented Parliament, with potentially as many as seven political parties represented and no single party, or realistic combination of two parties, close to a majority.

The only way to avoid ungovernable chaos, not just this winter but also in the coming Parliament, will be for both government and opposition MSPs to embrace the spirit of consensual and collaborative governing that the architects of devolution envisioned. The Scottish public deserves a functional Parliament in which our political representatives work together to solve problems, not one in which their self-interest creates new ones.

Mark McGeoghegan is a Glasgow University researcher of nationalism and contentious politics and an Associate Member of the Centre on Constitutional Change. He can be found on BlueSky @markmcgeoghegan.bsky.social