The CEO of Ryanair is clear about how he would govern a country. We are lucky that it doesn’t.
Michael O’Leary has spent decades building a reputation based on provocation and irreverence. The CEO of Ryanair has not only built Europe’s largest low-cost airline based on surcharges on your services and open confrontation with clients, unions and regulators. He has also turned each interview into a showcase of extreme opinions that rarely leave anyone indifferent. The last of them, granted to the Financial Timesis especially revealing. In it, O’Leary explains bluntly how he would run a country if he had the chance. To no one’s surprise, his approach is not too far from what has been applying for years at Ryanair: treat everything as a balance of results, eliminate what is considered “inefficient” and assume political wear and tear as inevitable collateral damage. Govern a country as if it were Ryanair. O’Leary doesn’t hesitate when asked about his vision of power. As he explains, if he had to govern a country he would do it exactly the same as his airline. Aggressively cutting public spending and, especially, social benefits. “I would run it like Ryanair, I would cut it big… I would cut benefits big. Get a job!” he says without nuance in the interview. Even when he recognizes that there are people who cannot work, his conclusion remains the same and he would not hesitate to reduce this aid. “Are there people who cannot work at all? Yes, but it would also cut their benefits,” said the controversial manager, who maintains an extreme vision of the minimum State, where the social protection network is perceived more as a cost than as a collective investment. Millionaire politicians to attract talent. The most striking part of the interview comes when O’Leary addresses salary of the politicians. There are no cuts on the horizon. For the Irish manager, one of the big problems in current politics is the lack of talent, and the solution is to pay politicians as if they were senior managers. His idea is that “If you are prime minister or a minister, you should earn at least one million pounds a year”, which is equivalent to 1,152,900 euros at the exchange rate. Very far from the 93,145.20 euros that are assigned as salary to the President of the Government in Spain, or 182,400 euros gross per year who receives the President of the Republic in France. “Politicians must be paid much better, although saying so is political suicide,” giving Singapore as an example, where senior public officials receive very high salaries to attract the most talented profiles in the private sector to politics and reduce incentives for corruption. Zero personal affinity with Trump. O’Leary’s interview Financial Times It also leaves room for his relationship with Donald Trump. O’Leary recounts a direct call from the then-candidate in 2016, in which Trump insisted for almost an hour on increase flights from Ryanair to airports close to its golf courses in Scotland and Ireland. The current president of the United States even offered him accommodation in one of his hotels. O’Leary’s response to Trump’s offer was to avoid at all costs approaching any politician. “No, no way. It’s not my style,” the executive concluded, making it clear that personal harmony with Trump never existed, although both share a very similar vision of the world as a place where everything is negotiated. The same approach you apply to your passengers. O’Leary’s ideas on how to govern are consistent with the decisions he has made at Ryanair during the years who runs Ryanair. From defending the charge for using the bathroom on board to imposing increasingly complex surcharges for luggage or boarding passes. Everything responds to one income maximization logic and reduce costs, even if that means a more hostile experience for the customer. Their inflexibility with refunds is another example. In the interview he remembers the case of a passenger stabbed in an attack on a train in the United Kingdom who tried to cancel a flightbut did not obtain a refund for the ticket. “If the company had offered him one, the doors would have been opened to other demands for reimbursement,” said O’Leary, for whom the company’s efficiency and profitability always come before empathy. An old idea with dubious results. The proposal to manage a country as if it were a company is neither new nor exclusive to O’Leary. Elon Musk already defended openly that approach from the DOGE who led in the first months of the Trump administration. The result was especially negative for the cooperation policy and the operation of the US administration. Trump himself has applied this logic of business negotiation to international and economic policy with the imposition of tariffs as a negotiation weapon. The results, at least so far, do not seem to be giving the best fruits for the United States economy. In Xataka | When Ryanair CEO went to a restaurant he was charged for two extras: “priority seating” and “legroom” Image | Flickr (Polish presidency of the Council of the EU 2025)
