With its validation last Friday by the Constitutional Council, Emmanuel Macron’s government has finally passed its legislation to raise the pension age to sixty-four. Its controversial passage into law has prompted vast opposition: refinery workers have held petrol shipments hostage, dockers have blocked deliveries, and a sustained strike by garbage collectors left uncollected bags piling up on the streets of Paris for weeks. So what are the government’s next steps?

In a televised address to the nation on Monday, Macron set out a three-pronged agenda claiming to move the country forward. He said he’d heard the anger in the streets, but that the answer to this should be neither “paralysis [nor] extremism.” Instead, Macron promised to move forward — by opening more professional high schools, by making moves to get people on welfare back into work, and by overhauling education so that students would be able to master French and mathematics and absent teachers could be more efficiently replaced.

Macron also said the country’s health care system would be rebuilt, and that the country would move “toward a new ecological and productive model” by unveiling an environmental plan in the summer. Yet behind the soft glove of these vague promises (including one vow for students to “exercise more at school”) was the iron fist. Macron has heard the anger on the streets: his response now is a pledge to hire ten thousand more magistrates and employees for the justice system and two hundred new gendarme (military police) brigades.