Mohamed Aboul-Ghar (founder/first president of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party) — interview (per Atlantic Council, ~2016): the ESDP's constructive-critical middle ground — "We are neither an opposition party, nor a pro-government party… When the president does something good, we support him, and when he adopts what [we] believe are wrong decisions, we speak out."

We are neither an opposition party, nor a pro-government party.

When the president does something good, we support him, and when he adopts what believe are wrong decisions, we speak out against those decisions.

[Source is English (Atlantic Council MENASource, quoting his "recent interview"; he is fluent in English); tier-2, confirmed verbatim against the fetched page. The second quote reproduces the Atlantic Council's exact wording, which reads "what believe are wrong decisions" — an apparent omission of "we" in the source's rendering, kept here for fidelity. These quotes are explicitly attributed by the Atlantic Council to party founder Abul Ghar — NOT to the incoming president Farid Zahran, who is quoted separately in the same article. published_date left NULL: the interview dates to ~early 2016 (around the ESDP's first internal presidential elections) but the exact date is not established here — not fabricated.] Declared position of Mohamed Aboul-Ghar (b. 1940) — founder and longtime president (2011–2016) of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party (ESDP), a Cairo University gynaecology professor, and a leading secular, social-democratic, liberal-left figure of the 2011 revolution (and the National Salvation Front against President Mohamed Morsi). Writing a weekly column "usually critical of the government's policies," he defines the ESDP's distinctive CONSTRUCTIVE-CRITICAL / MIDDLE-GROUND stance: "neither an opposition party, nor a pro-government party," supporting the president "when he does something good" and speaking out against wrong decisions. This is the EGYPTIAN SECULAR SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC / PRINCIPLED-INDEPENDENT pole — a centre-left party that judges the government issue-by-issue rather than aligning for or against it (founded on social justice, the civil state and citizenship), distinct from the regime-aligned "loyal opposition" of the Wafd (Sayed El-Badawi) and from the silenced dissidents (Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Patrick Zaki). [Axes: democracy / governance (constructive-critical independence; issue-by-issue judgement; party pluralism), economic / social (social democracy; social justice; centre-left), religion-state (secular; civil state; against both military and Islamist rule), regime-stance (principled non-alignment — critical of bad policies, supportive of good ones).]