0 achieved after a lot of difficulty or fighting:
a hard-fought victory
He stays as attentive to their hard-fought differences and polemics as to linkages and areas of mutual cooperation.
As such, advocacy of self-help is seen as problematic and rejected for fear that it might produce a rolling-back of the welfare state and/or the loss of hard-fought-for rights.
This was a hard-fought battle in the past and its echoes are sometimes heard from time to time.
I consider that the local education authority is using its hard-earned and hard-fought for financial resources in an extremely reprehensible way.
It was a hard-fought negotiation and that was the outcome.
It is sad that he should have been proved right after his long and hard-fought opposition.
We have had further hard-fought campaigns in the statistics war.
This campaign has been hard-fought both for and by those people.