SCOTLAND’S victorious Green candidates came together yesterday to celebrate their biggest ever regional vote win.

Although the party failed to secure the record performance predicted by some polls, it now re-enters the Scottish Parliament having tripled its MSPs from two to six and overtaken the LibDems as the fourth-largest party.

Co-convener and Holyrood veteran Patrick Harvie will return to the chamber as a Glasgow list MSP with a newly expanded team including 21-year-old Ross Greer, a former member of the Scottish Youth Parliament and the youngest MSP ever elected.

Greer, who represents the West of Scotland, will be joined by high-profile land reform campaigner Andy Wightman in the Lothians and one-time SNP member John Finnie.

Finnie, who left the SNP over its stance on Nato, served out his time as an independent but now represents the Greens in the Highlands and Islands, while Alison Johnstone also returns for the Lothians and Mark Ruskell, who was a parliamentarian from 2003-07, was selected in Mid Scotland and Fife.

The party, which has grown to more than 9,000-strong since the 2014 referendum, yesterday hailed its performance after winning almost 150,430 regional votes.

While Nicola Sturgeon ruled out entering a formal coalition with any party to shore up a minority SNP administration, speculation remained that the Greens could play king maker, working with Sturgeon’s side on a confidence- and-supply basis.

Yesterday Harvie said his party would deliberate its next move carefully, saying: “This has been a good election for the Scottish Greens. We have increased our presence in parliament threefold, and achieved almost a 14 per cent increase on our best-ever total in the regional vote across Scotland.

“It’s clear with the continued decline of Labour and the lack of an overall SNP majority that we have an opportunity to increase our influence in the next parliament. Greens have already proved ourselves to be a constructive yet challenging opposition group, delivering results on housing, fracking, fuel poverty and fan ownership of football clubs among many other issues.

“Our pledge to voters was to be bold and push the Scottish Parliament in a progressive direction. The new Green group of MSPs is meeting today to reflect on the result and consider our next steps.

"Meantime we thank all our candidates, activists and supporters for delivering our biggest and best campaign to date.”

Meanwhile, co-convener Maggie Chapman shook off her election disappointment, emphasising her ambition for the next parliamentary session.

She told a media source: “A minority administration is always a very different type of government. It gives us the opportunity to do something really quite special with this term.

“Having an SNP minority government, we can begin to build a new politics. A politics that isn’t about one-upmanship, but building support across communities.”

She added: “There are things where we do agree with the SNP, of course we will work with them. But there are significant differences.

“We are categorical in our opposition to fracking. We are very clear we want to use the full range of powers coming to Scotland to tackle inequality. We haven’t seen that kind of radical agenda presented by the SNP.”