Philipp Missfelder, the 23-year-old head of the conservative Christian Democratic Union's youth organization, caused outrage this year when he said elderly people should not burden the creaking health system by getting expensive hip replacements.
"In the past, people used to walk on crutches," he said.
But Erika Steinbach, a member of parliament who leads an organization that represents ethnic Germans expelled from eastern Europe after World War II, said pensioners earned their privileges by rebuilding a devastated nation.
"The young generation is wrong if it thinks old people are the problem. No, they themselves are the problem. The readiness to invest just as much energy and work in the future as the elderly did is not very widespread," she said.
Karl-Rudolf Korte, politics professor at Duisburg University, said such disputes were likely to become more fierce and urged the government to act fast to streamline the welfare state before an aging electorate produced deadlock.
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