François Hollande is suffering from a lack of support at home and in Europe. | By Getty France’s EU fail Hollande gets the blame as France continues to lose influence in Europe.

PARIS — French President François Hollande's attempts to revive Paris' influence in Brussels have fizzled, and France is at risk of losing yet more ground to Germany if his government doesn't rediscover an interest in the European Union.

The retreat is on display in Europe's institutions, where French officials occupy fewer top posts than other big EU countries; in the European Parliament, where a far-right party is stifling French policy; and in the French government, where efforts to streamline the way EU policy is crafted and executed have fallen flat.

French Europhiles place much of the blame with Hollande — once sold by aides as the spiritual heir to former three-time Commission President Jacques Delors – for letting France disengage from its traditional leadership role alongside Germany in a deeply unpopular European Union.

"Not only is France's influence in the main European institutions at an all-time low," said Yannick Jadot, a member of the European Parliament with the Europe-Ecologie party. "The country has never cared less about the situation that it's in."

The disengagement started before Hollande was elected, when a 'No' vote to a 2005 referendum on whether to ratify a European Constitution soured party leaders' view of the EU. It continued under former center-right President Nicolas Sarkozy, as the eurozone debt crisis gave way to German-inspired fiscal austerity policies that threw France onto the defensive.

But Hollande missed chances to reverse the trend. With his German counterpart Chancellor Angela Merkel, Hollande has often chosen qualified dissent rather than unity on EU issues such as how Greece should go about reimbursing its creditors. When the leaders appear unified, the context tends to be larger than the EU, as with their joint stance with regard to Russia in the Ukraine crisis.

By failing to at least simulate unity with Germany on strictly EU issues, France has allowed itself to be cast in the role of unequal partner, endlessly bartering with Brussels or Berlin over the pace of its deficit reduction efforts or the robustness of its economic reform program.

Even as France conducts long-overdue reforms, the attribution of roles has deepened resentment in France for Germany and the European Union — which few politicians dare defend in public, much less advocate for further integration.

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble prompted howls of indignation in Paris when, speaking in Washington last week, he summed up France's strained rapport with Europe: "France would be happy if someone forced parliament" to conduct tough reforms.

One of the clearest areas of French weakness is the European Parliament, where the presence of 23 MEPs from Marine Le Pen’s far-right, anti-EU National Front has hobbled the country’s ability to defend national positions.

But that result may have been tempered if Hollande had led a more robust campaign against Le Pen's relentless anti-EU rhetoric, instead of limiting his defense of the European Union to a little-noticed op-ed article in Le Monde.

That reluctance to stand up for Europe has shone through in Hollande's choices for candidates to top EU jobs, which have at times given the impression — rightly or wrongly — that the bloc was less than a top priority.

His former finance minister Pierre Moscovici was put forward as a candidate to be European Commissioner for Economic Affairs after being pushed out of Hollande's government in 2014, while his former education minister ended up at the European Parliament; and Harlem Desir, former head of France's Socialist Party, was given a job as European Affairs minister — becoming the third person to occupy the post since 2012, and the 12th in the last 12 years.

European MPs told POLITICO they had only met Desir twice since he took the job in April 2014.

"The message they're sending is: you fail, you go to Europe," said Jadot, who said that French MEPs' have not been able to form cross-party alliances on issues like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the European Union's budget.

Waning clout has also inhibited France's ability to place staffers in top EU bureaucratic jobs. At the Commission's Berlaymont building, German chiefs of staff now outnumber their French peers by four-to-one, with Germany’s Martin Selmayr holding the crucial post of chief of cabinet to Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Overall, the share of top staff posts held by French officials has dropped from 17 to 8 percent since 2009, a study by EU think tank Bruegel showed last week. That ranks France, Europe’s second-biggest economy, fifth in terms of European influence, behind Spain and Italy. Britain and Germany shared the first and second ranks, respectively.

A senior European Commission source said that France's permanent representation to the EU had worked hard to place staffers in directors' offices, filling cabinets with more French officials than from any other country. But for the most senior roles, he admitted that commissioners often angled for staffers with a direct line to Berlin.

“Top jobs go to the Germans because if you’re German, your country is economically strong, it’s fully engaged in Europe, and it’s backed up by a widespread liberal mindset,” said another senior European diplomat.

Philippe Leglise-Costa, head of the General Directorate for European Affairs (GDEA) — France's main EU policymaking body — argued that numerical superiority in posts like chief of cabinet or head of parliamentary committees did not necessarily translate into a loss of political influence.

“This is especially true of France,” he told the European-American Press Association recently. “The French have the particular trait of being very resistant to the idea that they will be defending French national positions” in Brussels.

France had also pulled off a slew of policy victories, most recently with Juncker's plan to boost investment, as well as pulling off a series of extensions on deadlines to reduce France's debt-to-GDP ratio.

“You have to look at the bigger picture,” said a spokesman for France’s permanent representation in Brussels.

But observers said such victories masked organizational problems in France's EU policymaking that limited its scope to one-off achievements during European Council meetings, instead of sustained policy influence.

Last April, Hollande shook up France's EU policymaking apparatus in an attempt to improve how policy was communicated to French antennae in Brussels by making his top Europe adviser, Leglise-Costa, the head of the GDEA, an EU body under the prime minister's authority.

Nine months later, Leglise-Costa was still head of the GDEA but he was no longer in Hollande's cabinet, where other advisers such as former Barclays Europe economist Laurence Boone have now taken a more direct role on European issues.

“They put a technician, a very able one, but not a politician, in charge of European policy and basically left him alone,” Jadot said of Leglise-Costa. “I find that worrying.”

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