Protesters storm Macedonia parliament after vote for speaker

SKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) — The Latest on the political crisis in Macedonia (all times local):

8:20 p.m.

Scores of protesters in Macedonia have broken through a police cordon and entered parliament to protest the election of a new speaker despite a months-long deadlock in talks to form a new government.

The protesters attacked police and lawmakers late Thursday, after the country’s Social Democrats and parties representing Macedonia’s ethnic Albanian minority voted for a new speaker.

Macedonia has been without a government since December, with the long-governing conservative and rival Social Democrats split over whether to consider ethnic minority party demands to make Albanian an official second language throughout the country.

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7:30 p.m.

Macedonian opposition leader has called for an end to a political deadlock that has left parliament unable to elect a speaker for three weeks.

Zoran Zaev suggested a new speaker could be elected outside normal procedures, an idea immediately rejected by the conservative party as an attempted coup.

Macedonia has been without a government since December, when former Prime Minister Nikola Gruevski’s conservative party won elections, but without enough votes to form a government. Coalition talks broke down over ethnic Albanian demands that Albanian be recognized as an official second language. A quarter of Macedonia’s population is ethnic Albanian.

Zaev secured the cooperation of another ethnic Albanian party, giving him 69 of parliament’s 120 seats. But President Gjorge Ivanov refused to hand him the mandate to form a government.