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North Korea's Kim warns against actions undermining Workers' Party's leadership system

Published: 09 Oct. 2025, 12:19 Updated: 09 Oct. 2025, 19:27

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un visits the Party Founding Museum in Pyongyang on Oct. 8. [KOREAN CENTRAL NEWS AGENCY]

North Korean leader Kim Jong-un emphasized the need to uphold the Workers’ Party’s monolithic leadership system and warned that any actions undermining it must be identified and eliminated ahead of the party’s 80th founding anniversary on Friday.

Kim visited the Party Founding Museum in Haebangsan Street, Pyongyang and delivered a speech, saying, “[The] most powerful lineage of ideology and revolutionary traditions peculiar to the Worker’s Party can never be swayed, revised or discolored,” according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Thursday.

Kim claimed that the key to the Workers’ Party’s record as the longest-ruling party in the history of the socialist movement lies in its consistent pursuit of ideological and leadership unity.

“Historically, our party was strengthened into a more militant leading political organization through the struggle for establishing the Juche orientation in ideology in the postwar days and different rounds of self-purification process including the anti-factionalist struggle,” Kim said.

The “anti-factional struggle” refers to a series of purges in the 1950s, during which North Korea’s founding leader Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong-un’s grandfather, consolidated one-man rule by eliminating factions opposed to his leadership, including the South Korean Workers’ Party faction, the Yan’an faction, the Soviet faction and the Kapsan faction.

“We should continue to firmly consolidate strict order and sound discipline within the party, while giving precedence to the process of finding out and eliminating in time all sorts of elements and acts that undermine the party's leadership prestige,” Kim said.

He also instructed officials to eliminate all forms of misconduct rejected by the people and harmful to socialism — including ignorance, incompetence, irresponsibility, self-preservation, formalism, opportunism, despotism, privilege and abuse of power — and called for a change in attitude.

Kim was accompanied on the site visit by members of the Politburo Standing Committee of the Workers’ Party Central Committee and senior officials from the party’s central leadership.

This article was originally written in Korean and translated by a bilingual reporter with the help of generative AI tools. It was then edited by a native English-speaking editor. All AI-assisted translations are reviewed and refined by our newsroom.
BY JEONG JAE-HONG [[email protected]]