By Kole Casule SKOPJE (Reuters) - Macedonia’s embattled prime minister rallied thousands of supporters on Monday in a show of force a day after opponents held their own mass protest to demand his resignation over months of damaging wire-tap revelations. The crowd in central Skopje appeared comparable in size to Sunday’s opposition rally when tens of thousands called for Nikola Gruevski to quit over a flood of disclosures that the West says have cast serious doubt on the state of democracy in the former Yugoslav republic. The crisis rocking Gruevski’s nine-year conservative rule is the worst since Western diplomacy dragged Macedonia from the brink of all-out civil war during an ethnic Albanian insurgency in 2001, promising it a path to European Union and NATO membership. A dispute with neighbouring Greece over Macedonia’s name has halted its Western integration, and in that time critics say Gruevski has tilted to the right, stoking nationalism and monopolising power in coalition with a party of ethnic Albanian former guerrillas.
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