Coalition has emerged as the big issue at the close of the campaign for Scotland's first parliament in three centuries.
The last opinion poll before Scots cast their votes today confirmed the picture that the governing Labour Party is almost certain to emerge with the most MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament). But it will not have the majority of the 129 seats which it wants.
After today, United Kingdom politics will never be the same. A new, proportional voting system threatens to undermine the traditional first-past-the-post constituency voting, which has delivered repeated large majorities of Labour and Conservative MPs in London, without either having majorities of the popular vote.
Voting for the Scottish parliament is similar to that in Germany, with one vote for the constituency and a second party vote to redress any imbalance from the first.
So as Ireland wrestles with a coalition crisis, Scotland looks likely to have the first peacetime cabinet pact on the British mainland since London's national unity government during the 1930's depression.
According to consistent polling evidence, the most likely combination will be led by the Labour Party, under Mr Donald Dewar, who will leave Mr Blair's cabinet to take on the First Minister's job.
The junior partner is likely to be the Liberal Democrats, who have traditionally been centrist, but now occupy a more left-wing platform than Blairite Labour, and who have their roots firmly in rural Scotland.
That prospect of coalition raises questions about how much Scotland will be allowed to diverge from the rest of the UK. All three parties fighting Labour want to abolish the newly-introduced university tuition fees, which cost £1,000 a year for better-off students.
They are arguing that if Labour cannot secure a majority, they can combine to kill tuition fees, while England, Wales and Northern Ireland keep them. Mr Jim Wallace, the Scottish Liberal Democrat leader, said on Tuesday that tuition fees would be dead in the water by Friday, though he made it clear they would be part of any pact negotiations. Mr Dewar has this week conceded that there may be nothing he can do to stop his opponents combining to abolish the fees, even if he is leading the administration.
The irony for the Liberal Democrats is that they have long campaigned for the proportional voting system which may now give them a seat at the Scottish cabinet table, yet they became so expert at focusing their vote on a few rural constituencies under the first-past-the-post system that they are in real danger of coming a humiliating fourth. The Scotsman poll yesterday put them at only 12 seats.
Liberal Democrats are now the second biggest Scottish party at Westminster, with 10 seats. The Conservatives, after 18 years in power, suffered a wipe-out at the polls two years ago, but the poll suggests that by tomorrow morning they will have 17 seats in the Edinburgh legislature. That way, Conservatives could form a coalition with a larger party, but they remain political pariahs to their opponents and say they are opposed on principle to coalition government.
Mr Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, bade a farewell to Edinburgh yesterday morning as he returned to his Banff and Buchan constituency in Scotland's north-east for today's vote. Where once the SNP was on course to defeat Labour and form the first Scottish government since 1707, his party is now fighting for a respectable second place with at least 40 seats.
A rally at the capital's Calton Hill, symbolic of the nation's home rule hopes, comprised only about 50 supporters and as many media. One Croatian journalist present said any such event in his home country would have brought at least 5,000 people onto the streets, yet the largest rally for any party in Scotland over the past five weeks has attracted only 300 and that was addressed by SNP supporter Sean Connery.
One of the main reasons is the news domination of the Balkan conflict, and on television on Tuesday night, Mr Salmond once more came under attack for his criticism of NATO action as unpardonable folly. He said, to jeers from the audience, that an SNP government in an independent Scotland would have taken no part in the bombings.
One other impact of the new voting system is that minority parties could make a breakthrough.
Yesterday's poll suggested that one hard-left candidate, the charismatic firebrand Mr Tommy Sheridan, would win a seat in Glasgow, while the Greens could at last make an impact on national politics in the UK with one other seat. Meanwhile, the UK government has this week moved to make it more difficult for such minority parties to win seats in the new London assembly, to be elected next year.