The battle for Glasgow could well represent the battle for Scotland. For the first time in decades, Labour's dominance of this sprawling city is under real threat.

On Friday what was once the second city of the British empire may find the Scottish National party in control, along with large swaths of local government, just as Alex Salmond prepares to campaign to take Scotland to full independence.

For the first minister Glasgow would be the greatest prize from Thursday's council elections. Nervous about the scale of the task, he knows it is a test of his party's apparent dominance of Scotland, 12 months after his landslide in the Holyrood elections.

Earlier this year, as the Glasgow Labour party went through a bloody deselection process, purging 20 councillors, Salmond confirmed he wanted Glasgow. But now, with Allison Hunter, stumbling leader of the SNP in Glasgow, attracting critical press coverage, the outcome seems less clear. The first minister, ever sensitive to the timbre of his message, is hedging his bets.

As he launched his party's local government manifesto in Stirling last month, Salmond said: "I don't want to single out any council; we're working really hard in Glasgow to make substantial progress to win, but we're working hard across Scotland, and our campaign is about local communities and priorities for local communities in Glasgow, Dundee, Aberdeen – all the great cities of Scotland."

The most the SNP will say privately is that they may just win enough of Glasgow's 79 seats to form a multiparty coalition with the Tories, the Greens or the Lib Dems. They no longer expect to dominate at City Chambers, as the council building is called. It remains to be seen whether SNP support will be dented by Salmond's ties to Rupert and James Murdoch, and his spat with Donald Trump.

If Salmond knows Glasgow is a major test, so does Labour. Its performance in Glasgow, with a £2.5bn budget and 30,000 employees, is being watched by Ed Miliband, who visited the city last Friday, and by David Cameron. They see it as a significant test of Labour's tentative recovery.

It has all cast Gordon Matheson, Glasgow council's Labour leader, into the unlikely role of heading a resistance: after decades of his party dominating the political landscape, his city is now Scottish Labour's only power base of any significance.

After briskly canvassing council flats in his ward, he is much less shy about predicting Thursday's result.

"Being the leader of Glasgow city council isn't for the faint hearted; you need experience, you need resilience and you need vision," he said. "I'm aware of the significance of the result in Glasgow at national level. But I'm used to pressure. I'm expecting an overall Labour victory."

Not that many voters walking through Matheson's large ward appeared to notice or care. In one of the most peculiar elements of this contest most parties expect a very low turnout. Pessimists suggest as low as 25%. Even officially the parties predict somewhere nearer 33%.

On policies, the SNP and Labour are claiming similar territory. The SNP is promising no compulsory redundancies in its councils, a "living wage" of £7.20 an hour and greater investment in employment; Labour is pledging greater economic regeneration, more free childcare and tackling youth joblessness.

Perhaps the tall man striding past Cowcaddens underground station with his girlfriend's arm wrapped around his waist had a view. He stopped, grinned, and flicked his hand backwards to a nearby tower block and said: "I live right there and didn't know that there was an election on."

Students from a nearby college admitted with shy smiles that they too were neither interested or aware of the elections. Only one, Lewis McWilliams, an 18-year-old school student about to vote for the first time, appeared keen. A likely Scottish Green party voter, he had a message which ought to worry the Scottish Labour party.

"I have kind of lost faith in Labour recently; basically their leadership," he said. "At a UK level, I don't think Ed Miliband is up to much." But neither is he a great fan of the first minister: "I was at the Scottish parliament with my school and although Alex Salmond is really good at what he does, he puts everyone down."

The first minister has that effect: voters either love him or hate him. Jean Murphy, 54, a shop assistant from Easterhouse, the estate on Glasgow's outskirts which became synonymous with municipal bungling, had this to say about Salmond: "He's a jumped up little upstart. He's full of his own self-importance and if he gets away with what he believes in we will be in a right mess.

"I think he's power-hungry, to be honest, and I think he's a Tory in disguise."

Two environmental consultants, Graeme Duff, 34, from Strathaven in South Lanarkshire, and Campbell Stewart, 36, from East Dunbartonshire, are the kind of floating voters attracted most recently by Salmond. Both voted SNP at the last general election, and Stewart is likely to do the same tomorrowon Thursday.

"I just can't take any more of the Labour goons and I can't hack the Tories," Stewart said. "I can't take more Labour: they'd been in government far too long and Ed Miliband is bloody weak; he's not even on the radar."

Yet neither has found the parties fighting hard for their votes this time. "I would say that the only party which has spoken to me so far is Labour," said Duff.

"I haven't had anybody apart from the Jehovah's Wwitnesses... I have had an SNP letter box drop and that's about it,." said Stewart.

And this ambivalence makes tomorrow'sThursday's result very difficult to call.

For the first time since devolution, this local election is being staged on its own, without being coupled to a Holyrood election. After chaotic scenes in 2007, when confused voters spoilt more than 140,000 ballot papers, the local and Scottish elections were split. And that is expected to reduce turnout.

Professor John Curtice, an elections expert at Strathclyde uUniversity, is dismissive of predictions of a low turnout. But the unpredictability of voter behaviour at council elections, the subtleties of the single transferrable voting system now used to elect multi-member wards for Scottish councils and the difficulties of predicting how any coalition talks will go, makes recent opinion polls largely irrelevant, he believes. "We just don't know; it's the big unknown," he said.

Johann Lamont, the Scottish Labour leader, rather threw political observers last month by conceding the SNP were likely to win more seats again, simply because it is fielding more candidates and is ahead in the national polls.

The SNP is the largest party by councillors in Scotland: it won 363 to Labour's 348 in 2007, while coming a close second to Labour on first preference votes. It is sharing power or in minority administration in 13 of Scotland's 32 councils, including Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Stirling.

While it failed to focus on the council elections in 2007, putting up just 22 candidates in Glasgow, the SNP is fielding 612 candidates this year against 497 for Labour. Both the Tories and the Lib Dems – whose support has been hit heavily by the coalition with the Tories at Westminster – have cut their candidates back. The Lib Dems are standing 84 fewer candidates.

Derek Mackay, the SNP local government minister and head of his party's council election campaign, is also keen to play down the significance of the Glasgow result.

"Progress for the party and government will be one more vote, one more seat, one more councillor," he said. "We haven't set any specific numerical targets. Our [canvassing] results suggest we're heading for a good solid election result, and that's right across the country. [The] biggest aim, the fundamental aim is we want to be the largest party with the largest share of the vote."

For Salmond that would be just fine: when the votes are counted on Friday, the first minister hopes to boast that the SNP have been reaffirmed as Scotland's largest party, propelling his party on towards their independence referendum in 2014. Having a victory in Glasgow would simply crown that nicely.

Up for grabs



In Scotland, the council seats being defended are:

SNP 368

Labour 337

Liberal Democrat 151

Conservative 131

Scottish Green 8

Independent/other 224

C

Number of candidates



SNP 612

Labour 497

Conservative 362

Liberal Democrat 247

Scottish Green 86

Independent/other 691

There are 32 councils in Scotland, elected using the single transferable voting system, in large multi-member wards. Four councils are run by Labour alone in overall control or in minority, with four run by the SNP in minority control. Three councils are wholly independent-run – the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland, while the rest are run by full coalitions.

Thirteen of those coalitions include the SNP as either lead or junior partner, including Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Stirling. Seven coalitions involve Labour as senior or junior partner. The Tories control just one, in minority: South Ayrshire. The Lib Dems are senior or junior partner in 13 ruling coalitions, including in Edinburgh.

There are just under 4 million eligible voters in Scotland: the turnout at last May's Scottish parliamentary election was 50%. In May 2011, 558,000 postal votes were issued and 77% were used, a fifth of all the votes cast.