MONTREAL - They set out to win five seats on Montreal Island in this provincial election, but on Tuesday night members of Québec solidaire had to settle for the two they wanted most.

Gathered at the Olympia Theatre in downtown Montreal, QS faithful watched as their party snatched up the districts they had pushed hardest to win — Mercier and Gouin — and came reasonably close to victory in Sainte-Marie-Saint-Jacques, losing to the Parti Québécois by about 2,000 votes. They suffered the same fate in nearby Laurier-Dorion, where the margin of victory was even narrower.

QS was less successful Hochelaga-Maisonneuve, a riding it had hoped was winnable, but whose voters handed an easy victory to the PQ.

The silver lining — heavily emphasized during a celebration so raucous that someone stumbling in from outside might have assumed that QS had formed a government — was that Tuesday’s twin victories give the left-leaning sovereignist party twice as much representation in the National Assembly, with long-time community activist Françoise David joining her co-spokesperson, physician Amir Khadir, in Quebec City this fall. Khadir, an often-divisive political figure who repeatedly made headlines last spring as a result of his unwavering support and eventual arrest during the student protests, was swiftly re-elected in Mercier by a comfortable margin, earning nearly 50 per cent of the vote and far surpassing his performance in the 2008 race, when he claimed the seat with 38 per cent. Overall, the party upped its overall vote share from 3.8 per cent in 2008 to six per cent in 2012.

David’s campaign in Gouin, meanwhile, was bolstered by her standout performance during a televised leaders’ debate on Aug. 19. Her main rival, the PQ’s Nicolas Girard, had history on his side as the riding is traditionally a PQ stronghold, but it wasn’t enough to best David, who earned 46-per-cent support over Girard’s 33 per cent.

“I am so happy,” David told reporters Tuesday night. “My election is the fruit of the work of my team … and it makes me so proud.”

Running on a platform centered on women’s rights, social justice and the protection of Quebec’s natural resources, QS stood out during the campaign by printing candid, un-airbrushed images of its candidates on election posters and encouraging them to wear the red square that became a powerful symbol of the fight against a tuition fee increase in the province. The party’s support of the student uprising would later be subtly re-affirmed in a powerful one-word campaign slogan: “Debout.”

From the beginning, the party maintained that polls conducted during the campaign did not accurately reflect their support on the ground. While the surveys consistently showed QS claiming about six per cent in province-wide voter intentions (with a slight boost following David’s appearance in the debate), Khadir claimed pollsters did not take into account the unique manner in which his party’s voter base is distributed.

“Their samples over-represent the areas surrounding Montreal,” he told The Gazette in August. “They consider Montreal as a global thing, but for Québec solidaire, west of Atwater and east of Pie IX is a desert. (QS’s support) is concentrated along the north-south métro line, in the central area of the city.”