As the sun went down on Friday, the newly re-elected Green MSP, Patrick Harvie, sat sharp-suited and sleepless on a bench outside the Scottish Parliament and tried to come to terms with the last 36 hours.

After years of planning, weeks of campaigning and a blur of media appearances, the Scottish Greens have ended up where they started: with two MSPs: Harvie in Glasgow and Alison Johnstone in Lothian in place of Robin Harper.

As many as six others didn’t make it, despite winning a total of 87,060 votes – 4.4% of the regional list vote. The hope, born of opinion polls, that they might beat the LibDems into fourth place after the SNP, Labour and the Tories, was dashed.

“It’s a disappointment, but not a disaster,” said Harvie. “We weren’t wiped out. We hung on by our fingernails.”

The Greens were the only party, as well as the SNP, to increase their share of the vote, albeit a tiny rise of just 0.3%.

And it fell far short of the party’s high water mark in 2003, when it returned seven MSPs with 6.9% of the list vote. “It’s been a tough day for us,” Harvie said. “But things could have been far worse. ”

Due to the SNP’s landslide, two Green MSPs will have less influence in the new Parliament than they had in the last. In return for backing Alex Salmond for First Minister four years ago, Harvie was made convener of an important parliamentary committee on climate change.

That’s unlikely to happen this time, as the SNP no longer rely on anyone else’s votes, so Harvie and Johnstone will have to do what they can as ordinary committee members. “It will be extremely hard work,” said Harvie. However, instead of trying to cover every policy issue, they can now focus on a few choice areas in which they can try to be more effective.

The Greens’ campaign was unashamedly left wing, as they argued in favour of tax increases to combat UK public-spending cutbacks.

This approach is unlikely to change, despite the flak Harvie has taken for it from the right-wing press.

“My favourite was in the Daily Mail,” he said with a smile. “They called me the voice of the irresponsible left-led anti-family anti-Christian gay whales against the bomb coalition.”