North Korean leader Kim Jong-un may have chosen his daughter to succeed him, South Korea’s Unification Ministry said Monday, after the reclusive country’s state media called the child a “great advisory person”, a title reserved for the most senior managers.
North Korea’s official media on Saturday used the term hyangdo in Korean, generally used only for the country’s leaders and their successors.
Analysts noted that this is the first time the North has described Kim Jong-un’s daughter in this way. The child, never named by Pyongyang, is called Ju Ae, according to South Korean intelligence.
“Usually, the term hyangdo is only used to describe higher-ranking officials,” Koo Byoung-sam, a spokesperson for Seoul’s Unification Ministry, confirmed in a briefing Monday.
It has fueled speculation that the young teenager, who often appears alongside her father at major public events, has been chosen to be North Korea’s next leader.
This would be the third hereditary succession since the founding of the country in 1948.
“We do not rule out the possibility that Ju Ae succeeds” Kim Jong-un, Mr. Koo added.
The teenager was revealed to the world by official media in 2022, while accompanying her father during an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test firing.
Since then, she has been called “Korea’s morning star” and “their beloved child.”
She was seen at several official events chaired by Kim Jong-un, including military maneuvers, a visit to an arms factory and a chicken farm.
In a photo released by Pyongyang on Saturday, she attends recent paratrooper exercises, alongside her father and senior military officials.
Before 2022, the only confirmation of its existence came from former American NBA star Dennis Rodman.
Initially, Seoul said the North Korean leader and his wife Ri became parents to their first child, a boy, in 2010, and that Ju Ae was their second.
But in 2023, South Korea’s unification minister said the government was “unable to confirm the existence” of Kim Jong-un’s son.
North Korea’s leader inherited power in 2011 upon the death of his father and has overseen four nuclear tests since, including the last in 2017.