ECB Insight: Pereira’s ‘No Dove’ Claim Is More Optics Than Doctrine

9 October 2025

By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Incoming European Central Bank Governing Council member Álvaro Santos Pereira’s insistence that he is “definitely not a dove” invites a natural question: if not a dove, then what? The answer, at least for now, is that the new Banco de Portugal governor’s self-characterization looks more rhetorical than substantive — a positioning move rather than a signal of hawkish conviction.

Pereira’s comment came as part of the choreography surrounding his appointment, in which establishing distance from his predecessor, Mário Centeno, was virtually obligatory. Centeno’s well-deserved reputation as one of the Governing Council’s most dovish members left an obvious vacuum for rhetorical contrast.

Pereira filled that vacuum with the line that he was “not a dove”, but both before taking office on Monday and since then has offered few clues about his monetary policy orientation, limiting himself to the comment at his inauguration that the ECB is “now entering a period of greater normality”.

While those words may be open to some interpretation, we think Pereira’s claim not to be a dove was chiefly rhetoric and mainly to be interpreted as a relative move away from dovish excesses — that is, to put space between himself and his extremely dovish predecessor.

We do not expect Pereira or any Banco de Portugal governor to execute a dramatic pivot to genuine hawkishness. That he won’t was confirmed to Econostream by one insider who assured us that he is not a hawk.

Indeed, while Pereira may have said that he is “definitely not a dove,” he conspicuously refrained from either claiming to be the opposite or simply making comments that would have settled the question.

Our perspective aligns with the institutional logic. Portugal’s debt load, fiscal sensitivities and longstanding preference for euro-area cohesion all militate against hawkish posturing. Pereira’s background as an economist and policymaker – including his tenure at the OECD and his pragmatic orientation toward structural reform – further supports a technocratic, consensus-seeking profile.

The ECB’s policy center of gravity today is neither aggressively dovish nor hawkish, but cautious and data-driven. Pereira fits that mold.

His emphasis on reform, competitiveness and supply-side strength underscores a belief that sustainable growth is more effectively secured through policy coordination than through monetary discipline alone.

Pereira’s instinctive caution may well earn him credibility among more hawkish peers, but credibility is not the same as alignment. Over time, we expect Pereira to emerge as a dovish centrist, favoring measured continuity and wary of policy shifts that could unsettle Europe’s fragile equilibrium.

That classification, which is how we rank him on Econostream’s hawk-dove scale, remains provisional. We stand ready to correct it if evidence – voting patterns, speech tone or relative wariness of further easing – justifies doing so.

For now, though, Pereira’s self-definition as “not a dove” looks less like doctrine and more like optics: a rhetorical pivot toward the center after years of dovish leadership in Lisbon, not an embrace of hawkish orthodoxy.