So, I cannot use the tokensafe in the second part of the query
I do not understand what you mean by this. It is valid to pass an expression of the form tokensafe("SEARCH_STRING") to a setting for a SearchManager.
Depending on how much you are omitting from your example, you may need to update "submitted" token model in addition to the "default" token model. Any SearchManager emitted from Simple XML will be bound to the "submitted" token model by default. However the code example you provide doesn't have the SearchManager bound to "submitted", so this may not be your issue.
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