PARIS, April 28 (Reuters) - Marine Le Pen's bid to become French president risked a setback on Friday when the man named interim head of her National Front party stood down to prepare legal action over allegations that he may share the views of Holocaust deniers. Days from the May 7 ballot when the far-right leader faces off against centrist ex-banker Emmanuel Macron, the abrupt exit of Jean-Francois Jalkh awoke ghosts from the Front's past and revived a furore sparked by Le Pen's father when he called the Nazi gas chambers a "detail" of history. The renewed controversy threatens moves by Le Pen, who expelled her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, from the party two years ago, to cleanse the FN's image of xenophobic and anti-semitic associations in an attempt to make it more palatable to a broader electorate. Though opinion polls still show her losing in the May 7 face-off with Macron, she has in the past few days been scoring public relations points off him with well-timed appearances and comments. Jalkh, a long-time ally of Le Pen senior who founded the National Front and one of 35 Front members elected to parliament in the mid-1980s, had been due to take over as interim party chief, a post Marine Le Pen vacated to focus on the presidential race. Front member Louis Aliot, Marine Le Pen's partner in private life, announced the move. "He (Jalkh) wants to defend himself and he will be filing a legal complaint because he feels his honour has been attacked, and I can tell you he firmly and formally contests what he is accused of," Aliot told BFM TV. Steeve Briois, another of the party's four vice presidents, would take Jalkh's place, Aliot said. At issue are comments attributed to Jalkh in a conversation with a researcher in 2005 about the work of Robert Faurisson, a professor convicted more than once for questioning the scale of Jewish extermination in Nazi gas chambers during World War Two. Le Pen's father, who was tried and convicted of inciting racial hatred for his remarks on the Holocaust, said as recently as 2015 that he had a right to make such comments because he believed them to be true. The 88-year-old former paratrooper courted controversy again on Friday when he said a remembrance ceremony for the policeman killed last week by an attacker in Paris "exalted" the concept of gay marriage because the gay policeman's male partner was given the stage to speak in his memory. In the run-up to her bid for power, Marine Le Pen has sought to cleanse the FN's image of such associations and recast it as a nativist, or "French first", party that opposes immigration, globalisation and European Union membership. The comments attributed to Jalkh, a little-known figure from the old guard of the party, resurfaced this week in newspaper articles following news that he was set to take over as interim leader of the party. Also unearthed was a newspaper report from 1991 that said Jalkh had attended an anniversary rally held by supporters of Marshal Philippe Petain, French wartime leader and Nazi collaborator, in July of that year. As Le Pen and her party grappled with a potentially damaging turn of events, Macron, headed for a campaign visit to a village that has been preserved as it was when SS soldiers killed nearly all of its inhabitants in 1944. Macron was expected mid-afternoon in Oradour-sur-Glane, the village in central France, now a "frozen-in-time" memorial to the 642 men, women and children killed in the space of a few hours in June 1944. Le Pen, seeking to defy the odds and beat Macron on May 7, was due back in Paris after a rally in the southern coastal city of Nice overnight. A new Opinionway poll published at midday showed Macron, like in most other polls, beating Le Pen convincingly in the final ballot with 60 percent of the total vote.
