A New Wales – Now the New First Minister Must Deliver

The 8th of May 2026 will go down as one of the most consequential days in Welsh political history.

For the first time in a generation, Welsh Labour is out of power. Plaid Cymru won 43 of the newly expanded Senedd's 96 seats, the largest party for the first time in their history.

Reform UK took 34. Labour were reduced to nine — their worst result in over a century. The sitting First Minister, Eluned Morgan, lost her own constituency seat, becoming the first head of government anywhere in the UK to do so while still in office.

This isn't simply a change of government. It's a realignment. A moment that is cultural as well as political.

In the media coverage running up to polling day, voters spoke about bleak high streets, towns that felt left behind, an economy that simply wasn't working. This mirrors almost exactly what our own members have been telling us. In FSB Wales' Big Small Business Survey, 53% of respondents described the high street as “bleak” (35%) or “bad” (18%). That's not coincidence — it's a shared reality that crosses the divide between business owners and the wider public, and it ought to focus minds in the new government from day one.

Rhun ap Iorwerth will become Wales' first ever Plaid Cymru First Minister, leading a minority government and seeking cross-Senedd agreement on individual issues. The new parliament has 28 days to formally elect him. After that, pace will matter. The mandate is there. The question is whether the new administration translates its promises into a coherent programme for government — and does so quickly.

Plaid fought this election on a serious economic platform. Their document “Making Wales Work,” published last April, runs to over 100 pages. I'll be direct: FSB Wales' own research runs through it — 18 times, across six of the document's seven substantive chapters. Our work on Wales' ‘Missing Middle' — the relative absence of medium-sized firms between our dynamic micro-business sector and the large, often externally-headquartered companies that dominate Welsh public policy conversations — is used as a foundational framework. Our evidence on the Development Bank of Wales, public procurement, skills and recruitment, and the decline of small manufacturing firms all feature too.

That's a measure of how far the case for a different economic model in Wales has travelled. The question now is whether those commitments become reality.

The priorities for the new administration are clear.

Business rates reform needs to be in the first budget. The good news is that Plaid's proposals are specific: a preferential multiplier for small businesses and the independent high street, funded by a higher rate on large multinationals and out-of-town retail. That's a sensible, cost-neutral approach and it maps directly onto what we've been calling for.

The new Welsh Development Agency is potentially the most exciting — and the most consequential — policy commitment to emerge from this election. Done right, with business genuinely co-designing it from the outset, it could be the vehicle that finally moves Wales beyond its stubborn growth trajectory and begins to grow the kind of locally-anchored, globally competitive businesses this economy needs. The Plaid economic plan is explicit about wanting to grow the number of Welsh-owned medium-sized businesses by 25% over ten years. That's a meaningful, measurable ambition. But it needs business at the table from day one — not as an afterthought, but as architects.

Public procurement reform is the other big prize. Only 14% of our members have ever won a public contract, yet 42% say they'd like to. That gap is an enormous untapped opportunity to grow Welsh SMEs, build community wealth, and reduce the Welsh economy's dependence on large, often non-Welsh-headquartered suppliers. The new government should set ambitious and transparent targets for Welsh SME participation in public contracts — and be held to account for meeting them.

The new First Minister has spoken about urgency and delivery. I welcome that instinct. But urgency without strategy is just noise. Twenty-six years since devolution started, Wales still significantly lags most UK nations and regions on productivity, wages and child poverty. That is a policy failure. And this election — as historic as it is in so many ways — is above all an opportunity to do things differently.

A clear economic strategy, with achievable targets and genuine accountability, is what that looks like in practice. Anything less would be a missed opportunity Wales simply can't afford.