Well actually it’s not in the foreground but to a log file, but if you tail / follow the logfile you could pretend it was the foreground :-)
mysqld_safe --log-error=/var/log/mysql.err
And perhaps you have imported a database for forensic investigation and you don’t know the database password, you can just skip the authentication:
mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --log-error=/var/log/mysql.err