The Workers' Front (, FO) is a Marxist–Leninist political party in Spain, with Roberto Vaquero serving as its president since June 2022. It was founded in October 2018 as a mass organisation by the anti-revisionist party PML (RC) and registered as a separate political party in March 2019. As of 2025, the Workers' Front took part to several national, regional, local, and European elections, winning one local seat in May 2023.
The Workers' Front's political positions include Marxism–Leninism, socialist patriotism, Spanish republicanism, Spanish nationalism, hard Euroscepticism, and social conservatism, with a Hoxhaist faction. Despite rejecting the left–right political spectrum, considering the mainstream left to have abandoned the working class and joined the right-wing in supporting neoliberalism, the party is commonly described as left-wing and far-left, more in line with Communist parties in Eastern Europe. It is also considered a left-conservative party, compared to the German Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance. As a result of its conservative stances on socio-cultural issues, various critics and observers compared the Workers' Front to the far-right Vox and described it as reactionary and right-wing populist in nature, including that the party was National Bolshevik, a claim that Vaquero strongly contested.
History The Workers' Front was established on 14 October 2018 at the Ateneo de Madrid as a front organisation of the PML (RC). Prior to its establishment, the Workers' Front had already formed committees and organizational structures throughout the country; the party's formation was promoted by various political groups, especially the PML (RC). Subsequently, the Workers' Front expanded to several cities in Spain, such as La Coruña, León, Ponferrada, Zaragoza, and Cádiz. In 2021, the party participated in Okupas, a Spanish squatting movement. FO occupied a prestigious building in the Mercado de Colón district in Valencia. It organized a food bank and the homeless shelter in the building, attacking the local government for not helping over 1,000 homeless people in Valencia. The party also hung the flag of the Second Spanish Republic on the building.
In May 2021, members of the Workers' Front organized a protest against the leader of the Podemos party Irene Montero in Valencia. The party accused Montero and her party of "leaving the workers in the lurch", claiming that Podemos organizes bailouts to banks and companies while Spanish workers are going "months without pay and suffering evictions". FO protesters argued that the feminist and pro-LGBT stances taken by Montero are "symbolic struggles that do not represent reality".
On 12 June 2022, their first congress was held. During the congress, the decision to become a political party was approved by the members. Representatives from other organizations, such as the Polisario Front, spoke during the congress. The congress addressed party's stances on issues such as immigration, the economy, reindustrialization, and Spain's position within the European Union and NATO. The congress also voted to modify the party's logo, and elect the National Board and the party president. Roberto Vaquero was elected the party's president.
In the 2023 Spanish general election, the Workers' Front gained 46,530 and won no seats. In late 2023, the group announced they would be participating in the 2023 Spanish protests against the PSOE government. Since then, the Workers' Front and Vaquero (the party leader since 14 June 2022) gained a presence on social media and national television in Spain, participating in debates on current political issues, such as Horizonte on channel Cuatro. In the 2023 Spanish local elections, a party member was elected councilor of Mandayona in the Province of Guadalajara.
In April 2024, the party held its Second Congress. During the congress, some political positions were revised, such as those concerning the national question and aspects of immigration. A new National Board was elected, and Vaquero was re-elected as president. Soon after its second congress, the party participated in the 2024 Catalan regional election, where it obtained 9,976 votes.
In the 2024 European Parliament election in Spain, the party won 66,242 votes, improving its result from the 2023 general election where it received 46,274 votes. In 2025, the party sparked controversy for publicizing neighborhood watch patrols created in response to immigrant crime and alleged drug trafficking. In January 2026, Frente Obrero joined the protests of Spanish farmers organized against the EU–Mercosur Partnership Agreement. In February 2026, it organized protests in Madrid against immigration in wake of the Spanish government's decision to regularize nearly 850,000 undocumented immigrants, arguing the PSOE-led government of pursuing "feel-good policies" while "dismantling infrastructure, trains, health system, and abandoning the population in natural disasters".
Ideology The Workers' Front was established as a Marxism–Leninist party, with conservative stances on social and cultural issues. It considers itself a "patriotic and revolutionary movement that fights for and on behalf of workers, for and on behalf of Spain", with the goal of implementing "drastic changes" in Spain and "ending the current regime". Strongly connected with the PML (RC), the Italian historian Steven Forti described it as oscillating between National Bolshevism and "hardline Stalinism". Alejandro Campillo Pérez described it as a "Stalinist-style communist" party. The party was also described as communist by the Spanish newspapers of record, and was classified by El Mundo as "a communist, republican, anti-oligarchic party". The party claimed to reject the labels of political left and right, considering them "two sides of the same coin"; however, its leader Roberto Vaquero described Frente Obrero as "the militant, working-class left". The party was described as left-wing by political commentators and political scientists, and was also commonly described as far-left, with Eugene Costello arguing that the party is "about as far left as you can get".
Frente Obrero is considered to share the national communist profile of the Russian CPRF. The European Conservative described the party as a representative of the "patriotic, pre-woke, pro-work left". El Progreso characterized it as "the old left, as opposed to the identity left", and as an "ultranationalist communist party". According to La Razón, "with a republican and federalist ideology, it has been classified within the communist ideological spectrum". Of the party, its leader wrote: "The need for workers' reorganization is vital, it is necessary to fight for revolutionary unity in a broad, united front of all workers. With this aim in mind, the Frente Obrero was born, which only tries to serve the unity of all those who want to rebuild a revolutionary, working class and militant left, which truly resists this system and its single thinking, which defends the workers, our country and which of course is aimed at the transformation and progress of our society." He defined the Workers' Front as a "national political and revolutionary front with the aim of fighting for the unity of the workers and for the transformation of our society, it is committed to a popular and federal Republic aimed at socialism."
Party programme In its party programme A Spain for the Workers, the Workers' Front postulated national sovereignty, Hispanic identity (Hispanidad), free university education, nationalization of the Spanish economy, establishment of a socialist economic system, energy sovereignty, nuclear energy, increasing the minimum wage, supporting the rural sector, promoting birth rates, creating more public housing, introducing rent control, and limiting immigration. The party focuses on class struggle and a planned economy, preservation of the "classical, Christian" culture of Spain, and support for Spanish republicanism. It also called for Spanish withdrawal from the European Union (EU) and NATO, along with expropriation of large landowners and political amnesty for political prisoners; the party criticized liberal democracy as "a scam designed to favor the party system that defends the interests of big capital", and instead supported "promoting and protecting our culture, history, and traditions from those who only want to see it disappear so they can control us more effectively". The party also takes an openly anti-capitalist and anti-free trade stance, decrying both capitalist and free trade as a threat to the Spanish workers and the economic sovereignty of Spain.
In its programme, the Workers' Front called for "the overthrow of the monarchy imposed by Franco" and its replacement by a "federal, popular republic on the path to socialism". It called for a dictatorship of the proletariat which would destroy "the repressive apparatus of the state: the judiciary, administration, police", and be a "democratic regime for the working class" but "dictatorial for the bourgeoisie and other exploiting classes". The party's federal popular republic would pursue "the recovery of Spanish national sovereignty", reindustrializing the country, nationalizing the Spanish economy, "repealing the successive labor reforms that have strengthened free and cheap dismissal for companies", expelling all foreign military bases, closing the border with Morocco, and immediately expelling all immigrants who committed crimes. In its opposition to the European Union, the Workers' Front argued that "Spanish sovereignty is being held hostage by the EU", which the party said "dictates how much and what we produce, tying our hands and feet, denying us the future we deserve." Since its establishment, the party also expressed opposition to capitalism, NATO, surrogacy, feminism, deindustrialization, queer theory, the Trans Law (Ley Trans), affirmative action, Islamization, cosmopolitanism, and political correctness.
The party adheres to Hoxhaist ideology. It is critical of Cuba, North Korea, China, and Venezuela, arguing that these countries are not socialist but neoliberal (China and Venezuela), state capitalist (Cuba), or "crazy" (North Korea). Vaquero argues that the only decent socialist regimes have been the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin, as well as the Socialist People's Republic of Albania (1944–1985) of Enver Hoxha. In contrast, the party has denounced Khrushchev as "revisionist", Yugoslav Tito as "opportunist", Trotskyism and Maoism as deviations from Marxism, and Romanian Ceaușescu for opening the Romanian economy to the West. Hoxha has been described as the party's role model. The party attacks the "pop left" () for falling into a "diversity trap", arguing that causes such as feminism, animal rights, inclusive language or environmentalism become "battles comfortable for the [capitalist] system" and bury the class struggle in the long run. Frente Obrero is supported by the Communist Party of Spain (Marxist–Leninist). Frente Obrero has displayed the portraits of Lenin and Stalin during its marches, and featured banners "in honor of those who fell for the Republic" and emblems of the Soviet Union.
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