Abstract Rising life expectancies and low birth rates across the Western world have heralded a profound change in the way representative democracy operates. Whereas representative democracy was politics for the young made by the old in the past, it is turning into politics for the old made by the old in the 21st century. Following Buchmeier and Vogt’s (2023. “The Aging Democracy: Demographic Effects, Political Legitimacy, and the Quest for Generational Pluralism.” Perspectives on Politics: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592723000981.) recent reflection on Japan’s status as the democracy with the oldest electorate, this article considers the case of Germany’s aging electoral democracy, using the 2021 federal election as its empirical foundation. Employing what Shapiro (2002. “Problems, Methods, and Theories in the Study of Politics, or What's Wrong with Political Science and What to Do about it.” Political Theory 30 (4): 596–619. https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591702030004008.) labels a problematizing redescription, the paper demonstrates that a recharacterization of gerontocratic rule as political adultism better explains the election outcome than a characterization of gerontocratic rule as such. In doing so, it draws up an original conception of political adultism as the socially-accepted interpersonal, structural, and institutional discrimination of young and younger people in politics and distinguishes between two temporal phases as disenfranchised and enfranchised political adultism. The two-stage idea of political adultism gives voice to the structural injustice toward young people as political beings and facilitates a critical reflection on whether the policy of lowering the voting age to 16 would really be as desirable as many of its proponents believe it is. The unique contribution of this article is the formulation of a new social structure that diagnoses a distinctive experiential bias in democratic politics at a time in which the relationship between demography and democracy is coming to a head.