from Sunday Herald, 8 May 2011
As the sun went down on Friday, the newly re-elected Green MSP, Patrick Harvie, sat sharp-suited and sleepless on a concrete bench outside the Scottish Parliament and tried to come to terms with the last 36 hours.
After years of election planning, weeks of ceaseless campaigning and a dizzying blur of media appearances, the Scottish Greens had ended up exactly where they began: with just two MSPs, Harvie himself in Glasgow and Alison Johnstone in Lothian in place of Robin Harper.
As many as six other colleagues from around the rest of Scotland never made it, despite winning an overall total of 87,060 votes – 4.4% of the regional list vote. The hope, born of opinion polls, that they might beat the Liberal Democrats into fourth place after the SNP, Labour and the Conservatives 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. But the increase was tiny, just 0.3 of a percentage point, and not enough to send any additional Greens to Holyrood.
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