NICE // The Bastille night carnage in Nice that killed 84 people and injured 202 more has shattered the show of political unity forged in France after the Charlie Hebdo murders last year.
Amid widespread political and public anger at alleged weaknesses in combating extremism, one senior opposition figure accused the socialist government of president Francois Hollande of having fallen into a "form of autism".
Another called for the detention without trial - known as internment - of terror suspects.
Meanwhile, as doctors continued their efforts to save the lives of critically injured victims of Thursday's horror, ISIL admitted responsibility for the massacre.
In the developing political controversy, a centre-right contender for next year's presidential elections, former prime minister Alain Juppe, said the Nice attack could have been prevented if "all means" at the authorities' disposal had been taken. He claimed that government measures put in place since last January's attack in Paris on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo were insufficient, though one government proposal - allowing French-born terrorists to be stripped of citizenship - was voted down by cross-party opponents. Other new steps include detention without charge for up to four hours after identity paper checks, and eased controls on the arming of police.
Georges Fenech, an MP from the centre-right Les Republicains, the same party as Mr Juppe, and the chairman of a French parliamentary commission into last year's attacks in Paris, criticised the "poor" official response to the commission's report.
Presented on July 5, the report highlighted a series of security failings and recommended the merger of elite units to create a single national counter-terrorism agency modelled on the US National Counter-terrorism Centre.
The report also rejected the idea that simply sending more police officers and soldiers on to the streets, as France has done, was an answer to the high threat to public security.
Mr Fenech insisted there was complete national unity "in the face of the suffering of the victims", but said he felt no obligation to remain silent on important security issues.
He claimed the government had run out of steam in the fight against terrorism, which required a "more strategic vision".
On Thursday, hours before the Nice massacre, in which Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ploughed a 19-tonne lorry into crowds gathered on the resort town's seafront, Mr Hollande said the state of emergency declared after last November's Paris attacks would be lifted on July 26.
That decision was quickly reversed after the killings in Nice but opposition critics say that a nominal state of emergency - in the absence of heightened and more effective security measures - offers no real answer to the scale of the threat facing France.
Eric Ciotti, another leading Les Republicains figure and president of the Alpes-Maritimes administrative department, which is based in Nice, said the reality was that France's state of emergency status had not even been applied in recent months.
"The raids that were one of its most effective elements were stopped," he told the Nice-Matin newspaper. "There were virtually no more residence orders [stipulating where those under some suspicion but not charged must live]."
Mr Ciotti said national unity did not require "national naivety".
"Words are not enough in fighting terrorism - there must be a strategy and actions, notably on the international stage," he said, adding his regret that France had joined others in criticising Russia when that country's forces were delivering blows to ISIL in Syria.
He also repeated a long-held demand for the introduction of internment for terror suspects, including in cases where there is insufficient evidence for criminal prosecutions to succeed. Prisoners who have completed their sentences but show signs of having been radicalised in jail should be among those detained without trial, he said.
The internment of terror suspects in Northern Ireland was widely perceived as a failure, having little effect on IRA or loyalist violence during the so-called Troubles. But Mr Ciotti said the gravity of the threat facing France demanded an appropriate response.
"I am accused of wanting to create our own Guantanamo. Actually, I just want to protect the French," he said.
Socialists were quick to condemn what they portrayed as unseemly party politicking ahead of presidential and legislative elections next year.
Mr Hollande said it was his responsibility to remain focused on his duty to safeguard the French people and that he refused to "stoop to this sort of excess".
"It is for this unity, cohesion and strength that I call today so France can be stronger than those who wish to hurt her," he said.
Sebastien Pietrasanta, a socialist MP, went further, saying that those responsible for the current polemic were "vultures, not statesmen". He said that not one of the Fenech commission's 40 proposals would have prevented the attack in Nice.
foreign.desk@thenational.ae
* With additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
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