I'm playing a game on Zulu specifically here, but I would imagine this advice holds for almost any unrec with bad starting laws. Every time you pass a law, simply negotiate with the armed forces and give them political concessions, even if you don't need their help to pass it. They're neutral to good on basically all important laws, meaning they actively support all those laws if you just give them more political concessions, further increasing their value for all the future laws they don't know they support yet. It's a really nice hedge to have against the landowners, and so far as I can tell there's no meaningful downside.
I did run into one slightly annoying time when I had a traditionalist leader, but thankfully since I didn't need to care about any other IG's to get good laws passed beyond getting them above 5% to get into government, I could just wait for an agitator, invite and then change the leader, and now I can go back to consolidating all political power into the army.