OECD countries are going through a demographic change which has no precedent in human history and the COVID-19 pandemic has made age and how different policies benefit a given age group at the expense of another more salient. The political implications of the growing size of the elderly vis-à-vis the rest of the adult population have been understudied in political science. In this study, we analyze the conditions under which a society's old-age structure affects political conflict. We present evidence from two studies. In our first study, we rely on a novel dataset to show that the old-age structure of European countries correlates with inter-generational conflict. Specifically, inter-generational conflict is lower in those countries that have a lop-sided age distribution, either skewed towards the young or towards the old. In a second study, we present evidence from pre-registered and well-powered survey experiments in Italy and the Netherlands to examine the extent to which COVID-19 pandemic fuels inter-generational conflict. Our evidence suggests that exposing respondents to the intergenerational trade-offs associated with non-pharmaceutical interventions to deal with the pandemic increases inter-generational conflict, but only in the context where the age distribution was skewed towards the elderly (Italy). This evidence has important implications for societal and scientific debates about inter-generational solidarity and policy-making aimed at different generations. It suggests that the pandemic when certain conditions are present may have long-lasting disruptive effects on the social fabric of our societies.