THE last time North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party, the KWP, held a national congress was in October 1980, when its present leader, Kim Jong Un, was not even born. The meeting’s main purpose was to formalise the party’s graduation from a traditional Marxist-Leninist dictatorship to a dynastic one. Mr Kim’s father, Kim Jong Il, was crowned as dauphin to his own father, Kim Il Sung, the country’s founding leader. The eldest Kim died in 1994 but, even in death, remains the country’s “eternal president”. Meanwhile party doctrine largely ditched Marx, Lenin and the rest in favour of Kim Il Sung’s own ideology of juche, or self-reliance (real meaning: distrust, confront and rob foreigners). Kim Jong Il ruled until his death in December 2011 without feeling the need ever to convene a party congress. Yet his son is preparing to preside over one, starting on May 6th. In the world’s most closed political system, it is not easy to work out why.

Precedent is no explanation. In 1980 five-yearly congresses were decreed. But a 35-year gap has opened since. The calendar imposes no more pressure on Kim Jong Un than it did on his father. Moreover, it will be embarrassing not to welcome foreign bigwigs. In 1980 177 delegates came from 118 countries, including Robert Mugabe, then Zimbabwe’s prime minister; the president of Guinea, Sékou Touré; and a Chinese delegation led by the late Li Xiannian, one of an “immortal” first generation of revolutionary leaders. The upcoming congress, it seems, will be a North Koreans-only affair. Kim Jong Un’s continuation of his father’s pursuit of a nuclear arsenal and the missiles to deliver it—most recently the claimed test of a submarine-launched ballistic missile on April 23rd—has isolated their country even further. An offer this week to halt nuclear testing in exchange for an end to annual American-South Korean military exercises was swiftly dismissed. The congress will highlight the flip side of juche. North Korea really is on its own.

Nor does the KWP have much to celebrate other than the claimed “success” (at best partial, say foreign experts) of its four nuclear tests, two of them under this third-generation Kim, with the most recent in January. A fifth seems imminent. Mr Kim has not yet inflicted on his people the kind of famine that killed hundreds of thousands under his father in the late 1990s. But just this month the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation produced a chilling report on persistent food shortages. It estimated that 10.5m people—two-fifths of the population—were undernourished and that 2.4m pregnant or breast-feeding women and children under five were at risk of malnutrition. Over three-quarters of North Koreans, it concluded, remain “food insecure”.

Yet on top of all its other woes North Korea has been enduring a “70-day campaign of loyalty”, a propaganda countdown to the congress’s opening. Clearly Mr Kim thinks it important. Indeed, some scholars of North Korea, such as Hajime Izumi of Tokyo International University, think nothing has mattered more for him. They believe that flaunting strength through nuclear and missile tests is aimed at laying the groundwork for a self-congratulatory congress—never mind the disastrous impact such chest-thumping has on the country’s foreign relations.

Mr Kim presumably hopes the congress will mark a formal consolidation of his own power. When he took over many outside analysts assumed he would merely be the Kim front for a ruling clique of more experienced thugs. In fact, he has ruthlessly purged the senior ranks of the party and army, even executing his uncle by marriage, Jang Song Taek, the regime’s main interlocutor with China. The congress may rubber-stamp his installation of loyalists in senior party positions. More of them are likely to be civilians rather than the generals who kept his father in power. It may also enshrine Mr Kim’s own ideas in party doctrine. This could involve a switch from his father’s songun, or “military first”, doctrine to his own “byungjin line”, of pursuing nuclear weapons and economic development in tandem.

The power of wishful thinking

If this happens, optimists believe the congress may prove a turning-point. It is early enough in his rule for Mr Kim not to have to take responsibility for the regime’s many failures. He can, however, claim credit for its nuclear prowess. Having proved that North Korea matches the description he had written into the preamble to its constitution in 2012, as a “nuclear state and a militarily powerful state that is indomitable”, he can turn his attention to feeding his people and easing their poverty. And that would imply patching up relations with China, North Korea’s only ally and main economic lifeline, which after the North’s most recent transgressions has seemed more serious about enforcing sanctions.