JOWLY, UNSMILING and bearing the unmistakable stamp of his famous family’s genes, the leader in waiting to North Korea’s messianic dictatorship has been unveiled to the world in fresh video and picture images.
A commemorative photo of delegates to the Workers’ Party’s most important conference in four decades, which wrapped up this week, shows Kim Jong-un taking his place in the country’s symbolic front row, after a lightning-fast rise through the ranks.
Until last week a shadowy, rarely sighted figure, the chubby young man in the picture – considerably better fed than the malnourished population he may eventually command – is now a four-star general, vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission and a newly minted member of the party’s Central Committee.
Pyongyang-watchers say he has few if any qualifications, except for the right genes, a few years in an expensive Swiss school and a spell accompanying his dad on his famous on-the-spot guidance tours of military and industrial installations.
Published on the front page of the party's newspaper Rodong Sinmun, the photo is effectively an official announcement that Jong-un is now the country's heir apparent.
"It appears that the only thing left is to formally announce is his succession," Lee Jo-won, a professor at South Korea's Chungang University, told the daily Chosun Ilbonewspaper yesterday.
Jong-un, believed to be 27 or 28, wears one of the jumpsuits made famous by his father Kim Jong-il in the photograph and he appears uneasy in the unfamiliar limelight.
Tellingly, the photo was taken in front of Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where the embalmed corpse of his grandfather and national founder Kim Il Song – the Great Leader – lies in a glass coffin. Flanked by black-suited cadres and senior military figures, he has his grandfather’s looks and his father’s apparent fondness for good food.