The WPK’s Politburo decided Monday to hold the 11th plenary meeting of the 8th Central Committee of the WPK in late December, according to the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA). It did not specify the date for the meeting.
The meeting will be held to “review the execution of the Party and state policies in 2024, confirm the orientation of struggle for 2025 and discuss and decide on a series of important issues arising in achieving the comprehensive development of socialist construction,” the KCNA said.
In recent years, North Korea has used a year-end party plenary meeting to lay out policy directions for the next year, including those on the country’s nuclear programs, and issues messages targeting South Korea or the United States.
North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may use the upcoming WPK meeting to set forth his U.S. policy line as the gathering will be held weeks before Trump takes office in late January.
Last month, Kim said his past diplomacy with the United States only confirmed Washington’s hostile polity toward Pyongyang, pledging to bolster the buildup of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.
Kim and Trump held rare summits in Singapore in 2018 and Vietnam in 2019. But the Hanoi talks ended without a deal due to a failure to narrow differences over the scope of North Korea’s denuclearization steps and sanctions relief by Washington.
At last year’s party meeting, the North’s leader declared inter-Korean ties as those between “two states hostile to each other,” and vowed not to seek reconciliation and unification with South Korea.
Yonhap
