SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Puerto Rico’s governor is vowing to turn the U.S. territory into the 51st state after statehood won in a non-binding referendum hit by a boycott and low turnout that raised questions about the vote’s legitimacy.

Gov. Ricardo Rossello told a couple hundred supporters waving U.S. flags late Sunday that he will soon create a commission to appoint two senators and five representatives to demand statehood from the U.S. Congress, which has to approve any changes to the island’s political status.

“The United States of America will have to obey the will of our people!” Rossello yelled to a crowd clutching U.S. flags and dancing to a tropical jingle that promoted statehood.

But experts say it is highly unlikely a Republican-controlled Congress would acknowledge Sunday’s results, let alone accept them because Puerto Rico tends to favor Democrats.

The referendum has sparked dozens of memes that turned viral, including some showing the tropical island covered in snow.

More than half a million people voted for statehood during Sunday’s referendum, followed by nearly 7,800 votes for free association/independence and more than 6,800 votes for the current territorial status. Voter turnout was just 23 percent.

It was the lowest level of participation in any election in Puerto Rico since 1967, noted Carlos Vargas Ramos, an associate with the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College in New York. He told The Associated Press that even among voters who supported statehood, turnout was lower this year compared with the previous referendum in 2012.

“Supporters of statehood did not seem enthusiastic about this plebiscite as they were five years ago,” he said.

Rossello brushed aside those concerns, noting that the referendum was a democratic process in which the majority prevailed as he questioned why more people did not come out to defend alternatives to statehood. He also said that participation rates varied from 7 percent to 35 percent for states including Wisconsin and Hawaii when they were ratified as states.

Three of Puerto Rico’s political parties including the main opposition party had called on their supporters to boycott the referendum, which they labeled a failure.

Former Gov. Alejandro Garcia Padilla, who did not seek re-election last year and whose party supports the status quo, rejected Sunday’s results.

“Whoever claims that statehood triumphed is being intellectually dishonest,” he said. “The boycott defeated statehood.”

The referendum coincided with the 100th anniversary of the United States granting U.S. citizenship to Puerto Ricans, though they are barred from voting in presidential elections and have only one congressional representative with limited voting powers.

Many believe the island’s territorial status has contributed to its economic crisis, largely caused by decades of heavy borrowing and the elimination of federal tax incentives.

Puerto Rico is exempt from the U.S. federal income tax, but it still pays Social Security and Medicare and local taxes and receives less federal funding than U.S. states.

“We have been a colony for 500 years, and we have had U.S. citizenship for 100 years, but it’s been a second class one,” Rossello said.

Nearly half a million Puerto Ricans have fled to the U.S. mainland to escape the island’s 10-year economic recession and 12 percent unemployment rate.

Those who remain behind have faced new taxes and higher utility bills on an island where food is 22 percent more expensive than the U.S. mainland and public services are 64 percent more expensive.

Jose Rosa, a 62-year-old retired corrections officer, said the island’s situation is the reason he voted for the first time in such a referendum, the fifth on Puerto Rico’s status.

“We need a change in the way we’re living,” he said. “You can see the crisis.”

No clear majority emerged in the first three referendums on status, with voters almost evenly divided between statehood and the status quo. During the last referendum in 2012, 54 percent said they wanted a status change. Sixty-one percent who answered a second question said they favored statehood, but nearly half a million voters left that question blank, leading many to claim the results weren’t legitimate.

The results of the newest referendum could lead to similar claims, Vargas said.

“Whether those results are legitimate or not depends on the audience that may be receiving (them),” he said. “If the advocates for statehood for Puerto Rico want to address the results to the U.S. Congress…then the results may appear weak, particularly when five years ago 834,000 voters supported statehood for the island. If the audience is the electorate in Puerto Rico, well, they spoke louder by their overwhelming abstention.”

Story: Danica Coto

PARIS — Emmanuel Macron’s takeover of French politics is all but complete. The newly elected French leader’s gamble that voters wanted to throw out old faces and try something new is paying off in full – first by giving him the presidency and, on Sunday, the crucial first step toward securing the legislative power to deliver on his pledge of far-reaching change.

As when voters turned the previously unelected Macron into France’s youngest president last month, Sunday’s first round of voting in two-stage legislative elections again brought stinging black eyes to traditional parties that, having monopolized power for decades, are being utterly routed by Macron’s political revolution.

His fledgling Republic on the Move! – contesting its first-ever election and fielding many candidates with no political experience at all – was on course to deliver him a legislative majority so crushing that Macron’s rivals fretted that the 39-year-old president will be able to govern France almost unopposed for his full five-year term.

Record-low turnout, however, took some shine off the achievement. Less than 50 percent of the 47.5 million electors cast ballots – showing that Macron has limited appeal to many voters.

Macron intends to set his large and likely pliant cohort of legislators, all of them having pledged allegiance to his program, to work immediately. He wants, within weeks, to start reforming French labor laws to make hiring and firing easier, and legislate a greater degree of honesty into parliament, to staunch the steady flow of scandals that over decades have eroded voter trust in the political class.

With 94 percent of votes counted, Macron’s camp was comfortably leading with more than 32 percent – putting it well ahead of all opponents going into the decisive second round of voting next Sunday for the 577 seats in the lower-house National Assembly.

Macron’s prime minister, Edouard Philippe, confidently declared Sunday night that the second round vote would give the assembly a “new face.”

“France is back,” he said.

Pollsters estimated that Macron’s camp could end up with as many as 450 seats – and that the opposition in parliament would be fragmented as well as small.

The Socialist Party that held power in the last legislature and its allies were all but vaporized – their 314 seats likely reduced, according to pollsters’ projections, to as few as 20 seats, and possibly no more than 30, in the new assembly. Projecting seat numbers is an imprecise science in the two-round system.

Socialist Party leader Jean-Christophe Cambadelis warned that Macron’s party could end up “almost without any real opposition.”

“We would have a National Assembly with no real power of control and without democratic debate to speak of,” he said.

On the right, the conservative Republicans were also reeling, projected to end up with possibly no more than 110 seats, and possibly as few as 70, having controlled 215 in the outgoing parliament.

The National Front of far-right leader Marine Le Pen looked unlikely to convert her strong showing in the presidential election into anything more than a small handful of legislative seats and certainly not enough to make the party into a major opposition force. That was Le Pen’s hope after she advanced for the first time to the presidential runoff that Macron won on May 7. Le Pen complained that the legislative voting system didn’t fully represent voters’ wishes – because her party got around 14 percent of votes but wasn’t able to greatly improve on the two legislators it had in the last legislature.

The party’s secretary general, Nicolas Bay, warned of Macron getting “a majority so big that he will have a sort of blank check for the next five years.”

Another sign of voters’ rejection of the political mainstream was that far-left leader Jean-Luc Melenchon was, with the Communist Party, projected to see his camp win as many as 18 seats, an improvement on the 10 they held before.

Voters said polls that had predicted a large majority for Macron’s camp likely dissuaded people from turning out. They also blamed the long election cycle, with party primaries that started last year before the two rounds of presidential and then legislative voting, for turning voters off.

“I’ve voted seven times in the last few months,” voter Jean-Luc Vialla said after casting his ballot in an eerily quiet voting station in Paris where voters came in a trickle.

“And the result seems written in advance. It demotivated people.”

Story: Sylvie Corbet, John Leicester