Is Ezzatollah Zarghami the next populist to rise from Iran’s hard-line camp? The recent activities of the former head of the conservative-dominated state broadcaster, who has been in constant verbal clashes with moderate President Hassan Rouhani, certainly raises this question.
Born into a religious family in 1959, Zarghami's father never bought a television. He, however, ended up being a cinephile, binging on movies. In high school, he was a classmate of Hassan Tehrani-Moghaddam, the father of Iran's ballistic missile program who was killed in 2011, and also former Reformist parliamentarian Hamid Reza Katouzian. When the 1979 Islamic Revolution overthrew the shah, then 20-year-old Zarghami was just starting a civil engineering program at Amirkabir University. Soon, he became one of the students who seized the American Embassy, leading to the cutting of diplomatic relations with the United States.