In France we are sad and angry. The Charlie Hebdo spirit is gone for ever, and with it any kind of national solidarity.

Politically we face a presidential election next year, a contest whose outcome will be determined by which candidate can demonstrate their determination to bring in new security powers and measures to our already overloaded statute books.

We were already under a state of emergency when the Nice attack took place. In fact, President François Hollande delivered the traditional Bastille Day speech to the nation declaring that he would lift the draconian measures imposed after the Paris atrocities last November.

But the Nice attacker was not on a watchlist, and the truck attack could not have been foreseen. The killer wasn’t known as an individual who had been radicalised. The intelligence services had no trace of him because he had apparently lived an ordinary life. This is the scariest part of the aftermath of Nice: how do we prevent such attacks coming from any ordinary neighbourhood?

I am afraid the answer is, we cannot.

Nice is a very secure city with a lot of CCTV cameras in the streets and a strong local police presence, in addition to national policing. The mayor of Nice is very involved in this situation.

Presidential and parliamentary elections are planned for 2017, and after this event security will dominate all the election manifestos even more than it already would have done.

After Nice we feel blindsided by violence. French society, like many others, is sick. We now have more than 10,000 young French people under surveillance who are believed to be on the verge of radicalisation, including 40% who are converts to Islam. But we need a reality check: no amount of new anti-terror legislation will bring them back from the fringes of extremism to where they belong in French society.

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These people have in fact lost any link to their citizenship. For those lost children of France, we have to restore trust in the French Republic. And that means more education and less discrimination. We don’t need any further suspension of civil liberties; we need to apply the existing law with zero tolerance for any crime committed in France whether by a national or by a non-national. But we also have to avoid Islamophobia.

France, along with many other countries, is facing the most challenging time of its history. How do you fight against terrorism when you live in a democracy? It is possible – and it has to be done without losing your soul.