By David Barwick – FRANKFURT (Econostream) – Since the European Central Bank’s March 19 meeting, Governing Council members have plainly worked to keep April 30 live. So much is clear. Less clear is whether policymakers are doing much to prepare the ground for such a move.

Those inclined to see an April hike would point first to the comments that followed the March 19 press conference. Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel called an April hike “certainly an option.” Latvijas Banka Governor Mārtiņš Kazāks said April was “very close” if the shock began spreading beyond energy. Eesti Pank Governor Madis Müller said an April move could not be ruled out if elevated energy prices persisted. Several policymakers also stressed that the conflict had worsened only after the ECB’s March baseline had effectively been finalized.

Taken in isolation, that cluster could conjure up the image of a Council moving steadily toward action on April 30. A broader sample does not support that reading, with more recent public communication instead settling into a careful balance that preserves optionality.

President Christine Lagarde’s speech at the ECB and Its Watchers Conference on March 25 did not tee up April in any strong sense. It laid out a spectrum in which a small and short-lived shock could still be looked through. A larger but temporary overshoot could justify a measured response. A more persistent inflation problem would require something stronger.

Central Bank of Ireland Governor Gabriel Makhlouf’s speech today pointed in much the same direction. He gave a fairly hawkish account of the risks, warning that the current price configuration sat between the baseline and adverse scenarios and recalling that the last inflation episode may have required somewhat earlier and more forceful tightening. But the operational message was still one of calibration rather than imminent action: it’s “not about choosing a preferred scenario” now, he said, but about ensuring policy robustness across outcomes and waiting for the data to clarify the direction of travel.

The ECB is thus not edging toward a hike so much as refusing to close off any part of the policy spectrum.

In general, recent communication has sounded more comfortable with patience. Executive Board member Isabel Schnabel’s intervention on March 27 was the clearest example. A hawk of real weight, Schnabel did not use her platform to prepare markets for imminent action. Instead, she argued that 2026 is not 2022, that the euro area begins this shock from a different starting point, and that there is no need to rush. As we wrote at the time, she gave the ECB room to wait.

Others have been pushing in the same general direction, though not all with the same emphasis. De Nederlandsche Bank President Olaf Sleijpen said there would be more information by April, but that the picture would still be incomplete. Banco de Portugal Governor Álvaro Santos Pereira called rate speculation “more than premature.”

Banque de France Governor François Villeroy de Galhau later complained of market “overinterpretation” regarding timing. Bank of Finland Governor Olli Rehn said a hike was “not guaranteed” after Tuesday’s inflation print. ECB Chief Economist Philip Lane explicitly framed the policy menu as still spanning no action, moderate hikes, or something larger, while rejecting both paralysis and pre-emption.

Bank of Slovenia Governor Primož Dolenc, meanwhile, struck a firmer note than some of those voices, warning that the adverse scenario could become the new baseline and that second-round effects might take hold faster than in 2022. And yet he still said that if the ECB lacked enough information by April 30, then it would probably be worthwhile to wait until June.

In the aggregate, those comments do not describe a Council lining up behind an April move. They describe a Council insisting that April remains available while resisting any suggestion that a decision has already begun to crystallize.

Background conversations we’ve had reinforce the sense that the ECB is deliberately preserving genuine optionality under high uncertainty rather than hardening expectations for a near-term hike.

One policymaker also suggested that, for a time at least, hawkish market pricing could do some of the tightening work for the ECB. That view should not be mistaken for a Council line, and on its own it says little about where the Governing Council as a whole will land on April 30. But it does help explain why policymakers may feel no urgency either to lean rhetorically into hawkish market pricing or to push back against it too forcefully. In that sense, even a balanced public message can have restrictive effects: tighter market pricing can buy the Governing Council time.

That leaves the Council in a position that is subtler than either the hawks or the market may at times have implied. The ECB is not teeing up an April hike. But neither has it settled on looking through the shock. What it is doing is keeping open the possibility that, four weeks from now, looking through the shock may still be justified. That is a real option, and public communication has increasingly sounded as though policymakers are comfortable preserving it.

The key shift since March 19 is not that the Council has become steadily more supportive of tightening on April 30. It is that it has moved from a shock-driven burst of hawkish alarm toward a more balanced position in which action remains possible, but waiting still appears slightly easier to justify publicly.

Our Tone Meter tells a similar story. After rising sharply in the immediate aftermath of the March 19 meeting, it has stopped signaling increased hawkishness and in fact edged down a bit today, with the Governing Council reading at 0.76 and the Executive Board at 0.54. That corroborates the view that the direction of public communication is no longer one of steadily building support for a near-term hike.

And yet April is no dead meeting: far from it. If the conflict is still ongoing by then, if supply disruptions remain severe, and if signs accumulate that higher energy costs are spreading into broader pricing behavior or expectations, the case against looking through the shock could strengthen very quickly. Several policymakers have made clear that under such conditions they would not want to fall behind.

But as of today, that still looks like a contingency rather than the destination. The Governing Council is preserving the option to move. It is also preserving the option not to. And judging from the direction of the public comments since March 19, the latter still looks just a bit easier for the ECB to defend.

We wrote after Lagarde’s March 25 speech that an April hike was not yet our base case and that her communication was about “preserving and preparing the hike option.” That assessment still looks broadly right. But the public rhetoric now sounds somewhat less supportive of actually using that option than it did in the days immediately after March 19. April 30 is still live. It just sounds less and less like the ECB is trying to lead markets there.