The relief on the face of Blue and White party leader and Defense Minister Benny Gantz was almost palatable as he entered a hotel conference center in suburban Tel Aviv on the evening of March 23 following a grueling, tense election day.

Although TV exit polls were giving Gantz’s centrist party seven to eight Knesset seats, just one year after it swept up the equivalent of 33 seats in Israel’s previous elections, he could not have hoped for a better result. “I was a fighter and I will continue to fight for Israeli society,” the former military leader pledged to the activists gathered in the hall. “Starting tomorrow, I will do everything to unite the bloc of change,” he said, referring to the group of parties dedicated to ousting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In the weeks prior to the March 23 vote, Gantz’s party faced a tangible threat of annihilation. Polls showed it teetering on the verge of the 3.25% electoral threshold, which risked keeping the party out of the Knesset and scuttling efforts by the political center-left to replace Netanyahu.

This projected scenario was at the center of a particularly vicious campaign mounted by the Yesh Atid party of Knesset member Yair Lapid, formerly Gantz’s partner in the Blue and White leadership. The two split in bitter acrimony after Gantz joined Netanyahu’s government last year. In recent weeks, Lapid had called on Gantz to bow out of the race given his party’s poor showing in the polls, hoping that his potential voters would switch their allegiance to Yesh Atid. Labor party Chair Merav Michaeli also urged Gantz to pull out and give the bloc a fighting chance against Netanyahu. Gantz, for his part, insisted on staying put and promised an election day surprise.