Shoppers buy fresh vegetables, fruit, and herbs at an outdoor produce market under green-striped canopies in Regensburg, Upper Palatinate, Bavaria, Germany, on April 19, 2025.
Michael Nguyen/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Euro zone inflation was unchanged at 2.2% in April, missing expectations for a move lower, flash data from statistics agency Eurostat showed Friday.
Economists polled by Reuters had been expecting the reading to come in at 2.1% in April compared to March’s 2.2% as inflation has been easing back towards the European Central Bank’s 2% target.
Several major euro zone economies have already released their latest inflation figures, which are harmonized for comparability across the bloc. Germany’s statistics office said Wednesday it expects consumer prices to have risen by 2.2% in April, below the previous month’s reading but slightly higher than expected. Meanwhile French harmonized inflation came in at 0.8%, also slightly ahead of expectations.
“We’re heading towards our [inflation] target in the course of 2025, so that disinflationary process is so much on track that we are nearing completion,” ECB President Christine Lagarde told CNBC last week.
Lagarde and other policymakers last week warned the picture for inflation was less clear in the medium-term, with factors such as potential retaliation countermeasures from Europe against U.S. tariffs and fiscal shifts like Germany’s major infrastructure package coming into play.
Lagarde said the ECB would be “data dependent to the extreme,” when making interest rate decisions. The central bank last cut interest rates last month, taking its key rate — the deposit facility rate — to 2.25%, down from highs of 4% in mid-2023.
Data released earlier this week indicated that the euro zone economy could be picking up steam, with the bloc’s gross domestic product rising 0.4% in the first quarter of 2025, according to a preliminary reading. This was higher than the forecast of 0.2%, and followed a revised 0.2% growth print in the last quarter of 2024.
Growth is however widely expected to slow in the coming months due to the global tariff fallout.
This is a breaking news story, please check back for updates.
