Workers' Party of Korea
sole ruling party of North Korea
The Workers' Party of Korea (WPK) is the ruling party of North Korea. Founded in 1949 from a merger between the Workers' Party of North Korea and the Workers' Party of South Korea, the WPK is the oldest active party in Korea. It also controls the Korean People's Army, North Korea's armed forces. The WPK is the largest party represented in the Supreme People's Assembly and coexists with two other legal parties, the Chondoist Chongu Party and the Korean Social Democratic Party, that are completely subservient to the WPK and must accept the WPK's "leading role" as a condition of their existence. Kim Jong Un is the current party leader, serving as General Secretary of the WPK.
The North Korean Branch Bureau of the Communist Party of Korea (CPK) was founded in 1945. In 1946, it was transformed into the Communist Party of North Korea (CPNK), becoming independent from the CPK, and merged with the New People's Party of Korea in the same year to eventually form the Workers' Party of North Korea. Meanwhile, the CPK was succeeded by the Workers' Party of South Korea. In 1948, the WPNK founded North Korea. In 1949, WPNK merged with the WPSK to form the Workers' Party of Korea. Kim Il Sung was installed as the leader of the WPK and the leader of North Korea.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Workers' Party of Korea” is sole ruling party of North Korea. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Workers', Party and Korea, not as a finished interpretation.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q49623. VIAF identifies the subject as 4184156012381649700002. The Library of Congress control number is n80120724. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1949, 1945, 1946 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Workers' Party of Korea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.