THE path to an SNP majority is now “clearly closed”, Professor John Curtice has said.

The top pollster’s calculations for the BBC predict that Nicola Sturgeon’s party will fail to gain the overall majority “they always denied they needed, but probably privately always craved”.

Curtice projected that, with 65 seats needed to win a majority in the 129-seat Holyrood chamber, the SNP would win 63, the same as they won in 2016’s elections.

The news came after the Tories managed to hold Aberdeenshire West, a key SNP target seat. 

He said that the possibility that the SNP return 64 seats cannot be ruled out, but “that the route to 65 is now clearly closed”.

The polling guru predicted that the parliament would almost be “a question of snap”, with the Scottish Tories returning 31 seats, the same number of MSPs as they previously had.

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He has predicted that Anas Sarwar’s Labour will lose a few seats, returning 22 MSPs in the new parliament, and Willie Rennie’s LibDems will lose one, returning four MSPs.

The Green vote however, which early indications say seems to be higher than ever before, means that the Scottish Parliament will have a stronger pro-independence majority than it did before.

The National:

The Greens returned six MSPs in 2016, but are now predicted to return nine.

This would mean that Holyrood 72 pro-independence MSPs sit in Holyrood.

Curtice said: “The thing that clearly comes out of this forecast is we are talking about a situation where roughly half of Scotland has voted for a pro-independence party and roughly half has voted for a pro-Unionist party, so this election has very clearly underlined the sharp division, even division, between Unionism and support for independence in Scotland.”

He said that, unless the polls shift, this means that a second independence referendum would be a huge gamble for either side and that no-one can know how Scotland would vote.