PARIS — France’s new minister for European affairs decried Thursday a loss of French influence in Brussels and said Paris needs to make daily efforts to ramp up staffing at all levels of EU bureaucracy.

Nathalie Loiseau, who was named to the post in a reshuffle last month, said France was good at campaigning for top international posts but less so when it came to staffing middle levels of bureaucracy.

Asked by an MP about a “loss of French influence,” Loiseau told the National Assembly’s Commission on European Affairs: “I share your concern.”

“In the commissioners’ cabinets, you find fewer French people than in the past. At the level of division heads, you find few French people and yet these are conduits through which things can be done,” Loiseau, a former head of the elite ENA school of civil service, said.

Left- and right-wing MPs last year alerted the state about declining influence within EU institutions in a report that flagged less prevalent use of French, a lack of representation in key Commission posts, a weaker voice in the European Parliament and a general decline in economic policy credibility.

The report also lamented degraded Franco-German ties and the unpopularity of Europe-focused career channels in the Foreign Ministry.

“We need to coordinate better with our German partners,” said Loiseau.

Loiseau said France had a strategy for influencing EU affairs, but needed to make daily efforts to fill middle posts while bolstering the country’s credibility.

“It’s a particularly French defect in all international organizations. We are extremely good at mounting campaigns to place chiefs and occupy the most highly visible positions,” she said.

“We are less good at helping young promising profiles enter from the bottom and helping them rise in European careers, and we must be very attentive to this.”

Pieyre-Alexandre Anglade, an MP in President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party, said France has no strategy to make sure French candidates are promptly put forward when mid-level posts in the European Commission open up.

“There is no French strategy at the Commission. When you’re not present at the intermediate level it’s hard to leverage influence. There is a window of opportunity with Brexit that must be seized,” said Anglade.

He also expressed concern about the French representation at the European Parliament, where the Euroskeptic, far-right National Front has a strong presence.

“There are only two French committee coordinators at the European Parliament,” he said. Former Minister for the Armed Forces “Sylvie Goulard was one and she is now gone.” Goulard stepped down amid allegations that her centrist MoDem party broke European Parliament rules on the use of accredited assistants. She and her party have said they did nothing wrong.

A French court opened a judicial inquiry Thursday into the case.

“We need to have a strategy inside the Commission to anticipate when jobs are opening and fill them. We don’t do that,” added the MP for French citizens in Benelux countries.

“I will act as a conduit between Paris and Brussels,” he said.

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