Rhun ap Iorwerth is now First Minister of Wales, which means Wales has a government again, sort of. Plaid Cymru’s first ever shot at running the country came together in the manner of all modern political arrangements: the other parties couldn’t be bothered to stop it, so it happened. Three other Senedd parties indicated they would either back his nomination or not oppose him, which is the political equivalent of shrugging while someone walks out of a shop with unpaid merchandise.
Ap Iorwerth called it “the greatest privilege of my life” to lead a government nobody actively wanted to prevent him from leading. The bar for privilege has never been lower or more accurately described.
What makes this particular constitutional moment genuinely surreal is that Plaid Cymru got here on the back of a campaign platform so divorced from actual governance that it deserves serious examination. The party ran on promises so abstract and symbolically detached from policy that they made every other Welsh political promise look like a five-year infrastructure plan. While other parties were talking about NHS waiting lists and education funding, Plaid was essentially running on vibes—specifically, the vibes of cultural nationalism expressed through metaphorical daffodils and the kind of emotional rhetoric that plays well at party rallies but translates to precisely zero legislative action.
The Saturday rally on the Senedd steps where party members spontaneously belted out the Welsh national anthem tells you everything you need to know about what Plaid believes governance actually is. It’s performance. It’s emotion. It’s the feeling of collective identity expressed through volume and harmony. Which is lovely at a concert. It is less lovely when you’re supposed to be managing a health service budget.
How does a party win government by essentially promising cultural symbolism instead of policy? Because the alternative parties were so exhausted, so fractured, so obviously tired of the whole enterprise that they simply allowed it to happen. Democracy doesn’t always work the way the civics textbooks suggest. Sometimes it works like a group chat where nobody wants to plan the evening, so whoever suggests something first—even if that something is “let’s just sing together”—gets to make the decisions.
Ap Iorwerth’s actual platform, stripped of the emotional language and the national anthem moments, amounts to this: Plaid will govern Wales in a way that feels more Welsh than the previous government did. That is not a policy. That is a feeling. That is something you experience at a rugby match, not something that fixes pothole funding or reduces hospital appointment wait times.
The real absurdity here isn’t that Plaid won. It’s that they won by running on something so vague, so emotionally resonant, and so completely disconnected from the actual mechanics of government that it makes you wonder whether any of the other parties even bothered to campaign at all. They probably didn’t. They probably looked at Plaid singing in harmony and thought, “Yeah, we can’t compete with that. Let them have it.”
So Wales now has a First Minister elected on a platform of cultural nationalism and symbolic unity, which sounds lovely until you remember that symbolic unity doesn’t fix the NHS, doesn’t build housing, doesn’t improve education outcomes, and definitely doesn’t make train services run on time. But ap Iorwerth will get to call it “the greatest privilege of my life” for the next few years while discovering that governing is approximately one million times harder than singing the national anthem on the Senedd steps.
The daffodils, at least, will remain beautiful and entirely non-committal to any specific policy outcome.