North Korea’s ruling party will elect new party leaders at a rare meeting in September in what analysts say could be a move to strengthen a campaign to hand over power from supreme leader Kim Jong Il to his youngest son.
Mr Kim, who suffered an apparent stroke in 2008, is believed to be grooming his youngest son, Kim Jong Un, to succeed him as leader of the nuclear-armed communist nation of 24 million.
The health of the 68-year-old Mr Kim, known as “Dear Leader”, has raised regional concerns about instability and a possible power struggle if he were to die without naming a successor.
North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party said earlier today that it will convene its conference in early September to elect “its highest leading body”, according to the country’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.
It will be only the third such meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea (WPK) since the communist state was founded in 1948 and is likely to designate Jong-Un as Mr Kim’s political heir.
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One analyst said the conference would have enormous political significance and would raise the status of Jong-Un, who is understood to be 27-years-old.
“This is an extremely rare meeting,” Kim Yeon-Chul, a professor at Inje University, told AFP, adding that the two previous sessions were held in the 1950s and in the 1960s.
“Through this conference, the North will likely grant Kim Jong-Un an official status as an heir apparent,” he said.
The planned conference — the first since 1966 — sparked speculation that the North could publicly announce Jong Un as his father’s successor by giving him senior party jobs.
The elder Mr Kim was tapped in 1974 to succeed his father, the North’s founder Kim Il Sung. That succession decision was made public in a 1980 party convention. Mr Kim then formally assumed leadership upon his father’s death in 1994.
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South Korea’s spy chief said this week that the elder Mr Kim’s poor health is driving him to speed up preparations for the transfer of power to his youngest son.
Won Sei-Hoon, director of the National Intelligence Service, told parliament on Thursday that Jong-Un was taking a much greater role in policy-making than before and had frequently accompanied his father on inspection tours.
Speculation about the succession of leadership in the isolated totalitarian state has intensified after Mr Kim suffered a stroke in August 2008.
He has since recovered sufficiently to return to work, however discreet efforts have begun to establish the image and reputation of Jong Un, who was formerly unknown to the North Korean population at large.
Mr Won reportedly told lawmakers that North Korea had launched a propaganda campaign aimed at making its people adore Jong Un. He reportedly said the country has been publicising songs and poems praising Jong Un and holding poem-reciting contests.
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Little is known about Jong Un, who was born around 1983, and is the youngest of three known sons by the North Korean leader’s two wives. Mr Kim’s former sushi chef said in a 2003 memoir that Jong Un looks and acts just like his father and is the leader’s favourite.
Earlier this month a South Korean news agency released what it said were new and rare photographs of Jong Un.
Three weeks ago Mr Kim appointed his brother-in-law as his deputy in what was the latest sign that he was consolidating his family’s grip on the world’s only hereditary communist dictatorship.
Chang Sung Taek was appointed vice-chairman of the National Defence Commission, the country’s most powerful state institution. Mr Chang is believed to be close to Jong Un.