The two candidates leading in France’s presidential polls, far-right Marine Le Pen and centrist Emmanuel Macron, are holding rival rallies in the French city of Lyon on Saturday.

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Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Front (FN) party, kicked off her presidential campaign and unveiled her platform on Saturday, as part of weekend-long conference in the French business hub.

Le Pen offered a strongly nationalist, anti-EU vision for the future of France.

"The aim of this programme is first of all to give France its freedom back and give the people a voice," Le Pen said in the introduction to the manifesto.

FRANCE 24's @josephbamat livetweets from Lyon Tweets by josephbamat

Le Pen proposed a platform of 144 "commitments", which included leaving the euro zone, taxing the job contracts of foreigners, lowering the retirement age and increasing several welfare benefits while lowering payroll tax for small firms and income tax.

The platform also provides for reserving certain rights now available to all residents, including free education, to French citizens only, hiring 15,000 police, building more prisons, curbing migration and leaving NATO's integrated command.

If elected, Le Pen says she would immediately seek an overhaul of the European Union that would reduce it to a very loose cooperative of nations with no single currency and no border-free area. If, as is likely, France's EU partners refuse to agree to this, she will call a referendum to leave the EU.

The electoral manifesto is short on macro-economic details and does not give any public deficit or debt targets and does not explain how a Le Pen government would balance raising welfare benefits while cutting taxes.

A warm-up for Le Pen vs. Macron

Opinion polls see the 48-year-old daughter of FN founder Jean-Marie Le Pen topping the first round of presidential elections on April 23, but then losing the May 7 run-off to a mainstream candidate.

Until just two weeks ago, conservative François Fillon was considered the most likely to be that mainstream candidate. But now the former prime minister is bogged down in a corruption scandal over handsomely paid, and possibly fictitious, parliamentary aide jobs for his wife and two children.

That means that Macron, the pro-European centrist, is now predicted to face Le Pen in the second-round vote. Macron will hold his own rally in Lyon on Saturday to propose a platform that is radically different from Le Pen’s.

Macron left his job as finance minister under current Socialist president François Hollande to launch an independent presidential bid with his own movement, “En Marche!” (“On the Move!”) in July. Macron has emphasised the economy and jobs in his campaign, promising to bring down France’s high unemployment taxes, and end to France’s “three decades of chronic unemployment”.

Hard-left candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon, who trails in the polls, also chose Lyon for a weekend rally.

The communist-backed Melenchon, 65 -- who scored an eye-catching 11 percent in the first round of the 2012 presidential election -- wants to raise the minimum wage, add a week to paid holidays and trim the work week to 32 hours.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS, AP and AFP)

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