By Francesco Canepa

FRANKFURT (Reuters) -France’s political standoff shows how European governments, caught between the demands of their ageing electorates and the need to keep spending in check, keep struggling to fix the pension-shaped holes in their budgets.

The right to a pension has been a central plank of the European social contract for decades. But longer life spans and fewer births mean most governments can’t afford to have people retiring on a full pension in their early 60s, as was once the norm.

Selling this fact to voters and getting the buy-in from parliaments has been supremely difficult, however, as numerous mass protests and coalition rows have shown over the years.

France provided the latest and perhaps most extreme example this week, when the government was forced to

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