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 first opened its doors 22 years ago, it served 300 people. In 2005, the year Ms. Merkel first became chancellor, it served about 1,500 people. Today it serves 10,885. Another 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.”

German poverty may sound like an oxymoron. But the disparity between the rich and poor has widened during Ms. Merkel’s 12 years in power, leaving nearly 16 percent of the population at risk of poverty, according to government figures. This incongruity has ushered in greater insecurity in a country that prides itself on its equitable social market system.

The country, no doubt, remains one of the world’s wealthiest, home to four of the globe’s largest companies by revenue, according to Forbes, with one of the highest average incomes in the European Union and lowest unemployment rates, at 5.7 percent.

That prosperity is often credited to Germany’s early embrace of neo-liberal economic reforms, a version of which are now being snapped in place even by President Emmanuel Macron of France.

Since the 1990s, these reforms have helped the German economy grow, kept unemployment low and averted the kind of debt crisis that hobbled the country’s European Union partners.

But the negative impacts of those same policies — put in place by Ms. Merkel’s Social Democratic predecessor, Gerhard Schröder — have intensified, analysts say.

Christoph Butterwegge, a political scientist who focuses on poverty at the University of Cologne, rejects the chancellor’s claim of a uniformly prosperous Germany as “superficial and undifferentiated.”

He blames her successive governments for allowing the families and individuals who run German companies to amass wealth through advantageous taxes and persistently low wages.

“That is her mantra, and it is true for a large majority of the people in Germany,” Mr. Butterwegge said of the chancellor’s line about German affluence. “But the growing prosperity of the majority has come at the expense of many others.”

Even as the number of working people has increased, so has the number of people relying on government benefits. Since 2012, an additional 2.1 million people have turned to government assistance. In all, 7.2 percent of the population rely on it.

Many are the working poor whose incomes are not enough to sustain them. More than seven million people hold so-called mini-jobs, part-time positions without any contributions to health insurance.

That is the darker side of the reforms, known as Agenda 2010. Although widely credited with increasing competitiveness and getting millions into jobs, many of those jobs have not provided a living wage.

They have led to a casting out of workers unable to keep pace with a fast-moving, flexible job market — something critics of Mr. Macron’s proposed overhaul of the French labor code are warning against.

“Poverty and wealth are structurally connected in this country, as they are in the United States, and Angela Merkel only sees that part of society that has benefited from the reforms of the Agenda 2010 that she refers to repeatedly and increasingly positively,” Mr. Butterwegge said.

“But if I look at other developments, such as the precarious job situation, 1.2 million people who hold down jobs but still live below the poverty level — the food banks have more than 1.5 million people whom they are helping — how an average family has never had it so difficult to find affordable housing in Germany’s large cities — these are developments that Angela Merkel likes to block out,” he said.

That rising insecurity has been the underlying context for the current election campaign, even if not a breakthrough issue.

Earlier this year, the center-left Social Democrats flocked to Martin Schulz, as a man who could return the party to roots that many saw as betrayed by Chancellor Schröder’s reforms.