Tzipi Livni was narrowly elected leader of Israel's ruling party and vowed on Thursday to start work immediately on forming a new coalition that will let her succeed the scandal-hit Ehud Olmert as prime minister.
After a tense night of counting following exit polls that showed the foreign minister cruising to a big win, the final margin over Shaul Mofaz, a former general who is now transport minister, was just one percentage point - or a mere 431 votes.
The final result was a huge relief to Livni, a 50-year-old commercial lawyer and one-time Mossad intelligence agent, who had confidently declared victory many hours earlier to her supporters within the centrist Kadima party. She still faces a bumpy path to becoming prime minister - a role only once before held by a woman, when the redoubtable Golda Meir led Israel in the violent years of the early 1970s. Party spokesman Shmuel Dahan put the final result at 43.1 percent for Livni to 42.0 percent for Mofaz - a huge swing from the 10- to 12-point margins shown in exit polls after just over half the party's 74,ers had cast ballots during the day.