“I’m fed up with us always giving in to them. They’re subsidy-seeking whingers. If local authorities don’t give in, they clear off. So fine, clear off!” Arnaud Boucheix is furious. This official for the CGT trade union at Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne airport in central France has just learned of the sudden end of Ryanair’s activities in his city, a move announced on January 20th by representatives of the airline in a meeting behind closed doors. That means a likely 25% to 30% fall in airport traffic and “job losses for sure”, the trade unionist says.
“Ryanair has chosen to cease its operations at Clermont-Ferrand airport from March 27th 2026, despite good load factors on the routes operated,” the Vinci Airports subsidiary that operates the airport confirmed to Mediapart.
The low-cost giant serves Fès in Morocco, Porto in Portugal and London from the capital of the Auvergne region, with load factors or seat occupancy rates of around 90% on the first two routes, according to figures given to Mediapart by the joint local authority which owns Clermont-Ferrand Auvergne airport, a body which includes elected representatives from the region, the local département or county, and Clermont-Ferrand itself. The London route, opened this year for the summer season, recorded a load factor of 70% in April-May.
“This decision forms part of a policy of withdrawal by the airline from several French airports in response to the increased tax burden on air transport in France since 2025,” the airport operator added. Clermont-Ferrand is indeed only the latest victim of a policy of blackmail through route closures, pursued across Europe by the continent’s leading airline in terms of aircraft numbers (more than 600), passengers (200 million in 2025) and routes operated (2,600 in summer 2025).
Enlargement : Illustration 1
From the Azores to Germany, and from Andalusia to Belgium, in 2025 Ryanair scrapped dozens of routes and millions of seats in response to countries or local authorities demanding airport taxes it deems too high.
“What these stupid politicians do not understand is that passengers and aeroplanes are mobile,” the airline group’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, declared on January 14th, referring to Belgian leaders he blamed for introducing a municipal tax of three euros per passenger departing from Brussels Charleroi Airport.
Solidarity tax
In France, where the airline was flying to twenty-five airports at the end of 2024, the measure that Ryanair is seeking to unpick is the recent increase in the country's solidarity tax on airline tickets. This was raised from 2.63 euros to 7.40 euros per passenger on intra-European flights in March 2025. By the end of July 2025 the operator had already announced the removal of 750,000 seats and twenty-five routes, a cut of 13% in its French capacity.
The Irish airline, which has been criticised for a minimalist approach to employment law, is nonetheless in good financial health. In July it announced a sharp rise in net profits, to 820 million euros in the first quarter of 2025, with revenue up 20% to 4.34 billion euros.
That did not stop its chief commercial officer, Jason McGuinness, from announcing in November 2025 that the company would leave “several French regional airports in the summer of 2026”. This message was bluntly summed up in late October by its chief executive O'Leary in The Telegraph as: “The fucking sky doesn’t belong to the French.”
Beyond the current clash over taxes, the Irish operator has become a master in the art of twisting the arms of local authorities to obtain subsidies. The practice has been denounced for years by the European Commission, on competition grounds.
In September 2025 the Commission ordered the French government to recover unlawful state aid the airline had received from Carcassonne airport between 2001 and 2011, amounting to 1.8 million euros. Likewise, in July 2022 the European executive called on France to recover 8.4 million euros received by Ryanair from La Rochelle airport between 2003 and 2010.
Various regional audit bodies or CRCs have also sounded the alarm, deploring the waste of public funds on subsidies in several cities which have had questionable impact. One such case was in Limoges in central France, where the CRC in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region highlighted the allocation of 19.7 million euros in aid to airlines between 2010 and 2016, including 8.7 million euros for Ryanair.
“The cost to the airport of each passenger flown by Ryanair thus stood at 14.8 euros in 2016,” it wrote in 2018. The Limoges public prosecutor’s office told Mediapart it had opened a preliminary investigation into the matter, which it had referred to the police's organised and specialised crime unit.
Disguised aid
A fact-finding report tabled by the National Assembly's finance committee on July 2nd 2025 distinguishes between two types of aid given by airports to airlines to secure their loyalty. First comes a variation in airport charges, authorised in specific cases, for example to encourage better performance on its carbon footprint, but which are “often diverted to grant disguised aid, awarded illegally and in a discriminatory way to low-cost airlines”.
Then there are so-called “marketing” commercial agreements, concluded by airport operators with carriers in return for a promised service, such as promoting the city or département served. “These agreements benefit only the airline, not the airports, yet some continue to sign them for fear of a collapse in traffic,” the report notes, referring to “outright blackmail in relation to airports”.
“As soon as the joint local authority body [editor's note, the airport's owner] begins to question the merit of this aid, the airline hops to another airport, because without these subsidies it can't survive,” adds the rapporteur of the study, MP Christine Arrighi, from the green party Les Écologistes. “Their business model only works on the basis of these subsidies.”
For the local authority management boards concerned, the health of their airport is often seen as synonymous with opening up the region and attracting tourist cash. “Local elected officials are attached to their airport,” says the MP from the south-west city of Toulouse. “At a time of decline, amid school and hospital closures, the airport becomes a symbol of attractiveness, a demonstration of their success.”
Christine Arrighi is nevertheless unable to put a figure on the scale of these transfers of money, due to the “opacity” surrounding the issue – there is no central authority overseeing such spending - and because of the lack of communication from local authorities. All she could do in her report was to pass on calculations carried out by Air France which “in 2008, estimated that passengers carried by Ryanair in France benefited from a subsidy of between 9 and 32 euros, sums which at a European level came to 660 million euros in aid”.
Proposed legislation
Thus is not the first time that Clermont-Ferrand has faced disappointment at the hands of Ryanair. The Irish airline initially touched down on the Auvergne tarmac 23 years ago, in an era when the airport was going through a crisis: the local carrier Regional Airlines had just moved its operating hub to Lyon.
Ryanair opened a route to London Stansted on May 1st 2003, in return for marketing aid of 768,000 euros for the first year of operation. But it halted its operations as early as January 12th 2004, after just eight and a half months, citing insufficient passenger numbers.
The company came back in 2013. Its practices were eventually flagged by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region's CRC in a 2023 report. The audit body said it found a total of 3 million euros paid by the joint local authority that owns Clermont-Ferrand airport to airlines between 2017 and 2021, without the authority being able to “verify the accuracy and reliability” of the contracts signed with those airlines.
Asked by Mediapart about the amount of aid granted by the airport to Ryanair in 2025, the local authority said the contract “represents 15% of the contributions made by the local authorities”, or just under 500,000 euros.
The end of the routes operated by Ryanair from Clermont-Ferrand is a demonstration of the unfettered capitalism this company represents.
The Irish operator, meanwhile, shifts responsibility to the French authorities. “Ryanair is a major employer and investor in France, particularly in regions where we provide vital connectivity and tourism,” it told Mediapart. “The question that needs to be asked should focus on what the French government is doing to enable French cities and towns to restore their air links by improving the competitive landscape […] through the abolition of aviation taxes.”
Some elected officials criticise both the company’s stance and that of local authorities. “The end of routes operated by Ryanair from Clermont-Ferrand is a demonstration of the unfettered capitalism this company represents,” says Anne Babian-Lhermet, regional councillor for Les Écologistes party and herself a member of the airport’s governing body. “While environmentalists regret the existence of air routes when there are rail alternatives, that's not the case for all destinations, such as Fès and Porto.”
Meanwhile, Clermont-Ferrand MP Marianne Maximi, of the radical-left La France Insoumise, attacks the “catch-all argument about opening up the area” through a “narrow view of transport”, in a region where “railway stations and lines are regularly closed but air routes are funded”. She continues: “These subsidies are never made conditional on respecting labour law and environmental rules. We're funding companies known for putting staff and passengers through hell.”
On December 23rd, along with nine other MPs, Christine Arrighi tabled a bill aimed at strengthening transparency over state spending that supports airports. In particular, it provides for the creation of an economic committee for all airfields and the annual publication of data, while the bill also links any state support for airports to climate goals.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this text can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter