France's presidential election campaign went into overdrive this weekend, with two key candidates, the centrist Emmanuel Macron and far-Right Marine Le Pen, each laying out their radically different plans to overthrow the established order.

The politicians held competing events in Lyon on Saturday as pressure mounted on Francois Fillon, who for months had been tipped to win the vote this spring, to pull out of the race because of the growing financial scandal centering on his British wife, Penelope.

Jean-Luc Melenchon, the far-Left firebrand who is neck and neck with the ruling Socialist party candidate Benoit Hamon, was due to add a touch of hi-tech magic to the election race by holding a rally in person in Lyon on Sunday and appearing simultaneously as a hologram at another meeting in Paris.

Mr Macron, 39, a clean-cut former investment banker who has never held elected office, kicked off the weekend with a rally at a sports centre in the south of Lyon attended by a largely youthful and often ecstatic crowd come to hear the man who promises to smash the “complacency and vacuity” of the French political system.