"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem spoke of a gigantic monarch whose empire had ended up reduced to stone legs in the middle of the desert. But, given the political landscape of Arrecife, perhaps Shelley simply got ahead of himself by two centuries and got the wrong island.
Yonathan de León has called on the Government of Spain to return migrants arriving by boat to Lanzarote to Morocco. And he has done so accompanied by one of those phrases designed to survive much longer on Instagram than in a Law manual: "The only thing armored is La Mareta."
Forceful. Resolute. Imperial.
He only failed to order the return of the boats from the City Hall balcony while a herald announced: "By order of the Mayor of Arrecife, European immigration policy is hereby resolved."
There is a small inconvenience. A tiny one. Almost insignificant: the law.
Because returning a person to Morocco does not work like returning a package because it arrived at the wrong address.
The current legal framework requires returns to be processed, and when there is an application for international protection, the procedures provided for by the European Pact on Migration and Asylum, fully applicable since June 2026, also come into play. The BOE itself recalls that directly applicable Union law prevails over incompatible national provisions.
In other words: there are administrative procedures, legal guarantees, Spanish legislation, European regulations, international obligations, and individual circumstances that must be examined.
But there is always an alternative.
The press conference.
That conception of politics where one formulates a forceful statement and all the legal architecture of a European Union Member State automatically disappears must be wonderful.
"Return them to Morocco."
Ah!
Well, problem solved.
How had the Interior Ministry not thought of this before? Why didn't Brussels call the Arrecife City Council? What are lawyers, civil servants, international treaties, European regulations, judges, and administrative procedures for when we can just ask Yonathan directly?
The migration issue is extraordinarily complex. Precisely because of this, it deserves more than turning human beings, borders, and legislation into material for a headline against Pedro Sánchez.
The Government's immigration policy can be criticized. Of course it can.
Greater border control can be demanded, more resources for Lanzarote, better return mechanisms for those who legally must be returned, greater European involvement, and a much firmer policy with Morocco.
All of that is legitimate.
What is intellectually much poorer is to behave as if the solution depended exclusively on Pedro Sánchez picking up the phone from La Mareta and saying:
"Come on, everyone to Morocco."
Especially because an exceptional situation does not turn the guarantees established by the legal system into an optional leaflet.
And here lies precisely the problem of certain contemporary politics: confusing a solution with a phrase that sounds like a solution.
Because governing is one thing, and posing as an emperor is another.
Lanzarote has more than enough reasons to demand attention in the face of migratory pressure. It has reasons to demand human, economic, and material resources. It has reasons to ask for co-responsibility from the State and Europe.
Precisely for this reason, the debate deserves rigor.
Not grandiloquence.
Not turning La Mareta into the argumentative wildcard for absolutely everything.
And much less selling as legally simple a decision subject to rules that far exceed the powers of a mayor, a city council, and even the unilateral will of the Spanish Government itself.
In the end, we always return to Ozymandias.
The king ordered.
The king proclaimed.
The king was convinced that his power was immense.
And centuries later, only ruins surrounded by sand remained. In Arrecife, we still have time to avoid ruins.
Although, seeing certain statements, the statue already seems to have been commissioned.
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