Emmanuel Macron, the centrist presidential candidate in France, vowed Thursday that he would not make the same mistake Hillary Clinton made during her presidential campaign in 2016.
France's presidential election is less than 10 days away, and Macron said he is not taking the race for granted as he seeks to beat his rival Marine Le Pen, a far-right leader of the National Front Party, CNN reported.
Emmanuel Macron may be leading in the polls but the 39-year-old independent centrist has endured one of the most difficult weeks of his campaign so far.
Labeled an "elitist" by his rival Marine Le Pen, criticized for his first round victory celebrations, and then overshadowed in his home town by the far-right candidate, Macron has spent much of the past week on the back foot.
It's why he's not moving his furniture into the Élysée Palace just yet–instead taking a lesson from the 2016 U.S. election, in which Hillary Clinton suffered a surprise defeat.
"That was almost certainly the mistake Hillary Clinton made," Macron told CNN's Melissa Bell. "I'm absolutely not playing that game. Right from the first day, that hasn't been the way I defended myself or how I fought."
Critics have charged that Clinton did not take Donald Trump's candidacy seriously for most of the campaign. A new insider account of Clinton's campaign revealed that she refused to prepare for populism to arrive in the United States, allowing Trump to seize the advantage.
Some commentators have said a similar dynamic could occur in the French election.
Since winning the first round of voting on Sunday and receiving endorsements from many of his rivals, Macron has faced campaign optics issues, with his opponent trying to portray him as someone out of touch with the public. For example, Le Pen visited factory workers at the Whirlpool tumble dryer factor in Macron's hometown of Amiens on Wednesday while Macron was visiting union representatives at the Chamber of Commerce.
"I am in the middle of employees who resist to wild globalization. I am not with the managers who eat petit fours," Le Pen said, according to BFMTV.
Macron later visited the factory workers and answered questions, labeling Le Pen's visit a stunt.
Macron, a millionaire investment banker and former government minister, also pushed back against the notion that he is a candidate for France's elite in an interview on the French national channel TF1.
"I am not the candidate for a little group or a kind of nomenclature," he said on Thursday. " I am going to protect the middle classes and the most vulnerable in France."
"I have a policy for education, for labor. That is what is specific about my project. [It] speaks to the whole of France, the entirety of the country, the towns and the countryside, the farmers and the industrialists, the workers and the entrepreneurs."
Macron and Le Pen will face off in the second round of voting on May 7, after receiving the most votes during Sunday's first round.