It was founded after the
2011 Egyptian Revolution by the merger of two minor liberal parties, the
Liberal Egyptian Party, and the Egyptian Democratic Party, on 29 March 2011. Notable founding members include
Mohamed Abou El-Ghar, film maker
Daoud Abdel Sayed, and later interim prime minister of Egypt under
President Adly Mansour. Hamzawy resigned from the party in April and formed the
Freedom Egypt Party on 18 May 2011. In August 2012, the party was admitted into the
Socialist International as a consultative member. The Egyptian Social Democratic Party and the
National Progressive Unionist Rally Party ran in the 2012
Shura council election as part of the
Egyptian Bloc. The division of seats between the two parties in the Shura Council is unclear. The party was accepted into the
Party of European Socialists (PES) on 18 February 2013.
Following the removal of
Mohamed Morsi from office in July 2013, a founding member of the Social Democratic Party named
Ziad Bahaa El-Din was reportedly offered the post of
prime minister.
Yunis Makhyun, chairman of the
Nour Party, objected to Bahaa El-Din's appointment and to the involvement of
Mohamed ElBaradei, because both of them belonged to the
National Salvation Front. Another founding member of the Social Democratic Party,
Hazem Al Beblawi, was appointed as interim prime minister on 9 July. He subsequently suspended his membership in the Social Democratic Party.
His cabinet was sworn in on 16 July 2013. Abou El-Ghar submitted his resignation in September 2015 because of divisions in the party, which the party did not accept. He requested that an election for party leadership be held in October. The party held a leadership election in April 2016 with
Farid Zahran and Bassem Kamel competing against Nour Farahat and Bahaa-Eldin; Zahran and Kamel won the race. Zahran and Kamel were seen as more willing to go against president
Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, while Farahat and Bahaa-Eldin were "reformist" in comparison. and the
2020 Egyptian Senate election. The party nominated Zahran for the
2023 Egyptian presidential election. He came in third place with four percent of the vote. The party joined the Democratic Path Alliance in June 2025, which also included the
Justice Party and the
Reform and Development Party, and began negotiations to also join the
National Unified List for Egypt. The secretary general of the party, Bassem Kamel, stated in a January 2026 interview that leadership elections were planned to be held in April 2025, but postponed due to the upcoming elections and are planned to be held as soon as they can. ==Electoral history==