FRANçOIS Hollande, the leftwing frontrunner in the French presidential race, has vowed to make the rich pay the highest price to help drag France out of its economic crisis, while promising to pump more money into schools and state-assisted jobs.

By scrapping some 29 billion euros worth of tax breaks for wealthier people introduced under Nicolas Sarkozy, he said he could find 20 billion euros to deal with the corrosion of French society: record unemployment, soaring youth jobless figures and an education system that has been shamed as one of the most unequal in Europe, where one in six children leave with no qualifications.

Hollande increased his lead in the polls after his first big rally on Sunday used Barack Obama-inspired slogans of 'hope' and 'change'. But he was under pressure to counter the charges by Sarkozy that the French left is high-spending, with its head in the clouds of idealism and little credibility on managing the world's financial crisis.

For the first time since the Second World War, the election campaign is dominated by an unpredictable economic crisis. Unemployment is at a 12-year high with 2.8 million jobless, and youth unemployment is over 20 per cent. Last year, the new unemployed were equal to the entire population of the city of Grenoble (about 157,000).

With France losing its AAA credit rating, and a gaping hole in state welfare coffers, the French left cannot make its traditional high-spending promises on public services, and has little room for manouevre.

If Hollande's Sunday rally was aimed at injecting some dazzle into what critics have called an unexciting campaign, the manifesto launch marked Hollande's return to the careful, number-crunching technocrat who ran the Socialist party for 11 years. The Nouvel Observateur likened him to an anaesthetist sitting in a white coat by the bed reassuring France about its major surgery. Le Monde called it a “Churchillian” manifesto; France isn't at war, but “things are bad”, the paper said.

If there is to be blood, sweat and tears in France, Hollande suggested they would come from the richest five per cent: “If there are sacrifices to be made, and there will be, then it will be for the wealthiest to make them”.

One plank of his manifesto was making the tax system fairer — raising the tax bracket for the highest earners favoured under Sarkozy. He also focused on education and youth, promising 60,000 new jobs in schools and 150,000 state-aided jobs for youth, as well as help for small start-up companies.

Hollande said he could bring France's bloated deficit back on target by 2017. — The Guardian, London