Some of his strategy, though, can be divined from the course of events. Mr Karadzole believes Milosevic's best chance is to distance himself from his own party, the SPS, and portray himself as a man of the people who is as outraged by the electoral abuses as the street protesters."There are still a lot of people in this country prepared to believe he is special and above the fray," Mr Karadzole said.That would explain why he has acted through the government, not his party, and chosen to communicate with the students while ignoring the organised opposition. It explains why the government leaks have talked about punishing those responsible for the election fiasco and reshuffling the cabinet. And it explains why the JUL, the hardline Communist party run by Mr Milosevic's wife, Mirjana Markovic, has been shunted aside in the manoeuvres of the past few days.Will all this be enough to keep Mr Milosevic at the helm? The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which issued a damning report into the rigged elections at the end of December, is insisting on a definitive answer by Thursday.

The United States is threatening sanctions if there is any prevarication. The Serbian people have had many of their previous illusions about Mr Milosevic shattered by the last two months of protest, and the street demonstrators are vowing to keep up their pressure. So it will be a delicate operation.If Mr Milosevic is successful, he will appease the international community, give his government a more open-minded profile, crack open the united front now being presented by the opposition and rebuild his personal popularity - less, this time, through propaganda in the state media and more through political savvy.But he has a long way to go. The economy is in ruins and the prospects for a rapid injection of foreign credit look dim while he remains in power. The JUL, once intended as the means with which to build up a revitalised Serbian left, is a millstone around his neck which he cannot easily get rid of because of his wife.There are questions, too, about Mr Milosevic's feel for political reality after so many years as the undisputed strongman of the region."Every day that passes without a resolution gives us more ammunition," said Miodrag Perisic, vice-president of the opposition Democratic Party, "and makes the international community more convinced that he has to go.". Bulgaria's beleaguered Socialist Party yesterday said it was ready to negotiate with the opposition over its demand for early elections after almost a week of daily protests which spilled into violence in the early hours of Saturday morning.

More than 100 people were injured when riot police used batons and blank cartridges to disperse crowds surrounding the parliament building in central Sofia. More injuries were reported later in the day when scuffles broke out outside the presidency. As tens of thousands of protesters rallied outside Sofia's Alexander Nevsky cathedral, the Socialist leader, Georgi Parvanov, said talks on resolving the crisis could start today. At the same time, he said he expected his party, which still has two years of its mandate to run, to govern for at least another year in order to "stabilise" the country as it tries to overcome its worst economic crisis since 1989.Loud cheers went out as news of the concession reached the protesters, many of whom interpreted it as victory. Spokesmen for the opposition Union of Democratic Forces (UDF), however, were more cautious, saying they planned to continue the demonstrations until a date was set for the elections.

They also showed no sign of backing down on their call for a nationwide strike from today and a campaign of civil disobedience.Unlike the protests in neighbouring Serbia, which are over the government's cancellation of opposition victories in local elections, those in Bulgaria follow a catastrophic economic meltdown last year which saw annual inflation reach 310 per cent, the value of the national currency, the lev, decrease eightfold, and bread queues for the first time since the overthrow of communism in 1989.The demonstrators say that the Socialist Party, which won an absolute majority in the 1994 parliamentary elections, has brought the country to the brink of bankruptcy and that it is incapable of introducing economic reforms. They also argue that the Socialists - the direct successors to Bulgaria's former Communist Party - lost their moral right to rule when their candidate in last November's presidential election was defeated by the UDF's Petar Stoyanov.Hardline Socialists have condemned the protests as an attempt to stage a coup d'etat, pointing out that the party was legitimately elected to power and that if it bowed to pressure from the streets now, it could set a dangerous precedent.Whoever ultimately assumes responsibility for the country's future will face a daunting challenge. With 90 per cent of the economy still in state hands, Bulgaria has yet to implement the privatisation programmes long since in place in most of their more former Warsaw Pact allies such as Poland and Hungary.. Bosnia is in the grip of the coldest winter Central Europe has known this century. But British observers are worried that when spring comes, the return of refugees from abroad and attempts to return displaced persons to their former homes will spark unrest. Whether to press for the return of displaced persons or to accept the de facto division of the country is "the biggest question the international community has to face in 1997", according to the Secretary of State for Defence, Michael Portillo, who visited Bosnia at the weekend. Although the Dayton peace agreement of November 1995 painted a picture of a return to different religious and cultural groups living side by side, officers in the 31,000-strong stabilisation force (S-For) believe that it might bring about a return to violence."You could argue we are deliberately provoking the next conflict by imposing a return to the circumstances that led to the last one," a senior officer in the British sector said. "I suspect it will be the large-scale return of refugees here that may displace the situation." Displaced persons - DPs - are also referred to as the "Dayton paradox".In addition, the return of refugees who have been abroad and drawing large benefit payments, especially in Germany, is expected to spark resentment.