On Friday, France’s Constitutional Council decided to uphold the core of President Emmanuel Macron’s unpopular pension reform — giving the green light to a law that will raise the country’s retirement age from sixty-two to sixty-four. This was the most likely outcome from the April 14 ruling, with the arbiters of France’s fundamental law sticking to their conservative instincts to safeguard the government’s package. In a parallel decision, it rejected a demand for a referendum on the reform, although a separate request for a nationwide vote was submitted on Thursday and will be judged in the coming weeks.

Having pocketed this victory, Macron’s hope is that the council’s decision will tie the knot on his controversial reform by providing it with a desperately needed dose of institutional legitimacy. As Macron claimed last month, the ruling would cap off the law’s “democratic pathway,” an egregious euphemism for his government’s muscling of a reform package rejected by a clear majority of the French public, an alliance of the country’s unions, and opposition parties of the Left and Right.

Macron’s pension reform has become the law of the land without ever having faced a direct vote from elected representatives in the National Assembly, where the president’s coalition is short of an absolute majority. Besides failed no-confidence votes in the lower house on March 20, the closest thing that Macron’s government has to approval from legislators was a shotgun vote forced on the Senate earlier last month. This major overhaul of the country’s pension system was adopted in a fifty-day blitzkrieg thanks to the use of a special legislative track designed for budgeting bills.