Several thousand people rallied in front of the headquarters of Macedonia's rightist ruling party on Saturday demanding the immediate resignation of Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski and early elections. The rally was the culmination of days of smaller countrywide protests provoked by an incident last week when the opposition was ejected from the parliament after a disagreement and a brawl over the size of next year's budget.

"We have already decided, we will go to the end, until we finally win and bring democracy back to this country" Branko Crvenkovski, the head of the opposition Social Democrats, told the cheering crowd. Last week the government proposed a 148-billion-denari ($3.2 billion) budget for 2013 last month, forecasting a deficit of 3.5 percent of gross domestic product. It put growth next year at 2 percent of GDP.

But the left-wing opposition condemned the budget proposal as profligate at a time of austerity and demanded a cut equivalent to about $260 million. The government refused and the opposition then submitted about a thousand amendments to the draft before tensions flared on Monday. The government pushed the budget vote with just over half of deputies present, prompting the opposition to initiate a campaign of civil disobedience. At the rally, Crvenkovski said his party's backers will maintain protests until the government steps down, paving the way for early elections organised by an independent body.

Copyright Reuters, 2012