BREMERHAVEN, Germany — In her campaign speeches, Chancellor Angela Merkel loves to tell potential voters in next week’s election that they are living in the best Germany ever. Last year she boasted to Parliament that Germans “have never had it better.”

But it does not feel that way to Helmut Richter.

For the past five years, Mr. Richter, 59, has worked from dawn to dusk, sifting donations for the Tafel food bank in a part of Bremerhaven, a once-prosperous northern port city, that has earned the unwelcome moniker of the “poorest neighborhood in Germany.”

When his organization opened its doors 22 years ago, it served 300 people. In 2005, the year Ms. Merkel became chancellor, it served about 1,500 people. Today it serves 10,885. An additional 120 families are on a waiting list.

“I think it is tragic that the Tafel even exists, that it needs to exist,” said Mr. Richter, a volunteer who survives on government assistance and his own weekly food ration. “I don’t know what the politicians think is happening here and what they are doing.”