Three months ago, tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Serbia's provincial cities calling for the resignation of the Yugoslav President, Mr Slobodan Milosevic. Momentum was gathering. Many believed the President would be gone by Christmas. Yet Mr Milosevic has survived.
His success in clinging to power is a tribute to the formidable state machinery which he still controls, a concerted effort by the regime to demonstrate Serbia's reconstruction and the disarray and divisiveness of the opposition.
The NATO bombing decimated the infrastructure of the country, causing economic damage estimated at nearly $30 billion by independent Serb economists. Yet within days of the war's end, the state newspaper Politika and state-controlled Radio Television Serbia (RTS) inundated citizens with stories of planned reconstruction.
Mr Milosevic and the Serbian Premier, Mr Milan Milutinovic, were seen standing by destroyed bridges, bombed apartment blocks and destroyed schools, pledging to rebuild them. Whatever the quality of the work, several of those promises have in fact been fulfilled.
Yet social and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating in Serbia. Unemployment and poverty have risen dramatically following the air campaign.
According to a UN report released earlier this month, poverty has nearly doubled in the past year, with 63 per cent of the population now living on about £48 a month.
Hospitals throughout Serbia are in crisis. Mr Dusan Stojic (42), a general surgeon at Pancevo Hospital, 17 km from Belgrade, says that many of his cancer patients have to pay for their chemotherapy drugs; if they cannot they must go without.
"It's really a big problem. The people want to know if the drugs will help because, if not, they will need to keep the money for the funeral," he said.
From army officers and soldiers to pensioners and street cleaners, almost everyone is receiving late pay. Last week judges staged a protest march in the capital over late wages.
The universities, another potential threat, have been targeted by Mr Milosevic through a repressive law which has led to many professors who challenge the system losing their jobs. This has destroyed the academic and intellectual class.
Mr Milosevic has been helped by the natural fertility of Serbia's land. The country is said to be self-sufficient in agriculture.
Most analysts had believed that once winter began to bite, lack of heating in Serbia's cities could trigger protests. However, the regime has clinched a deal with the Russians to ensure there will be sufficient gas to fire the boilers of the hot-water systems heating flats and offices.
"All the estimations [of a heating crisis] were made on lack of gas and we will have sufficient now through an agreement with the Russians. It will be paid for in 2004 - which means someone else will be paying," said Mr Bratislav Grubacic, an analyst close to both the Serbian opposition and members of the regime.
"Milosevic is now playing for time," says Mr Grubacic, who believes the President's overthrow is unlikely to happen this winter.
The opposition Alliance for Change has pinned its hopes of unseating the President on early elections. Yet deputies in Serbia's parliament voted against early polls in the opening session of the assembly yesterday.
Then the parliament, dominated by the parties of Mr Milosevic and his wife, Ms Mirjana Markovic, moved to consider a new electoral law. If passed and implemented, this could help Mr Milosevic further, destroying the opposition's crucial power base in Serbia's provincial towns.
Police injured between 30 and 40 student protesters who were demanding early elections outside the Belgrade parliament yesterday. Meanwhile, the Serbian Renewal Movement (SPO), the only opposition party represented in parliament, walked out of the assembly in protest at its refusal to set up a commission to investigate the October 3rd car crash in which four of its members were killed.